Is Math Intervention Working? Learn to Build A Better Fence

If you’ve ever wondered what to actually do during small group time in math, this episode will give you a clear and practical way to support students without lowering expectations.

We built a simple Math Coherence Compass to help district and school leaders make aligned decisions around math—without adding another initiative. Get your free copy and training here https://makemathmoments.com/coherence-compass/

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Yvette's Summer Task List.

Every school system wants to improve student achievement in mathematics. Yet when students struggle, the immediate response is almost always the same: more intervention, more support programs, more people working at the bottom of the cliff. While these efforts are essential, they often come at the expense of investing in the work that could prevent students from struggling in the first place.

Using the classic "ambulance at the bottom of the cliff" parable, this episode explores why school systems consistently prioritize rescue over prevention. It's not because leaders don't believe in strong Tier 1 instruction—they do. The challenge is that prevention is harder to see, slower to measure, and more difficult to defend. We unpack why intervention feels more urgent, why leading indicators matter more than waiting for test scores, and how systems can make the invisible work of prevention visible through classroom evidence and instructional coherence.

In this episode, you'll explore:

• Why intervention often receives more attention and funding than prevention
• The "ambulance vs. fence" metaphor and what it means for math improvement
• Why Tier 1 instructional coherence is the foundation of long-term success
• The difference between leading and lagging indicators of improvement
• How to measure instructional shifts before test scores change
• Why sustained professional learning outperforms one-off professional development
• Practical questions leaders can ask to rebalance investment toward prevention

If you're leading mathematics improvement in a school or district, this episode will challenge you to rethink where your time, resources, and attention are focused—and help you build stronger systems that prevent students from falling behind in the first place.

Show Notes Page

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Are you wondering how to create K-12 math lesson plans that leave students so engaged they don’t want to stop exploring your math curriculum when the bell rings? In their podcast, Kyle Pearce and Jon Orr—founders of MakeMathMoments.com—share over 19 years of experience inspiring K-12 math students, teachers, and district leaders with effective math activities, engaging resources, and innovative math leadership strategies. Through a 6-step framework, they guide K-12 classroom teachers and district math coordinators on building a strong, balanced math program that grows student and teacher impact. Each week, gain fresh ideas, feedback, and practical strategies to feel more confident and motivate students to see the beauty in math. Start making math moments today by listening to Episode #139: "Making Math Moments From Day 1 to 180.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Every school system wants to improve student achievement in mathematics, yet when students struggle, the immediate response is almost always the same. More intervention, more support programs, more people working at the bottom of the cliff. While these efforts are essential, they often come at the expense of investing in the work that could prevent students from struggling in the first place. Stick with us! In this episode, we're going to explore why intervention often receives more attention than funding prevention, the ambulance versus the fence metaphor, and what it means for math improvement, why tier one instruction coherence is the foundation that you should be focusing on, and how to measure instructional stress beyond test scores.

SPEAKER_01 0:40

Let's get into it.com. This is the only podcast that coaches you through a six-step plan to grow your mathematics program, whether it's at the classroom level or at the district level.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

And we do that by helping you cultivate and foster your mathematics program like strong, healthy, and balanced trees. So if you master the six parts of an effective mathematics program, the impact that you're going to have on your teachers, your students will grow and reach far and wide.

SPEAKER_01 1:27

Every week you'll get the insight you need to stop feeling overwhelmed, gain back your confidence, and get back to enjoying the planning and facilitating of your mathematics program for the students or the educators that you serve.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

But this is this is a topic that's been on my mind from the various conversations and strategy sessions and the coaching sessions we've had over the years. It reminds me of a poem in 1895. A man named Joseph Malins wrote a little poem that has somehow stayed relevant for a hundred and thirty years. It goes a little like this A town sits at the top of a beautiful cliff. The view is gorgeous, and people they get close to that cliff and keep falling off the edge. So the townspeople gather to do something about it. Someone eventually proposes building a fence at the top of the cliff. Reasonable, it's cheap. It would stop the falling. But the conversation drifts the way these conversations do. Some someone points out that the people who've already fallen need help now. Right now. Someone else notes that how good it would feel to have a shiny new ambulance staffed and ready, waiting in the valley below. And at the end of the meeting, the town has voted, as you guessed, overwhelmingly, to fund the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff instead of the fence at the top. The poem's punchline here is that everyone in the room knew that the fence made more sense. They said so out loud, they build the ambulance anyway. If you're a math coordinator, a math coach, administrator, you have lived this poem. You just didn't know it had a name. Here's the version that plays out in K-12 math across North America here. And I I bet you can map it onto your own district in about four seconds. Kids are struggling in our classrooms. So you stand up in an invention block, you buy a supplemental program, you hire intervention staff, you pull the strongest teachers off tier one to run small groups, you build a credit recovery pathway. Every one of those is an ambulance in the valley. And every one of them is genuinely necessary because there are real kids failing right now, and you can't just let them hit the ground. But notice what almost never gets funded with the same urgency: the fence. Coherent tier one instruction, a shared instructional vision for K to eight, teachers deepening their own mathematical understanding so that the foundational concepts actually land the first time, that tier one instruction can be taught flexibly in the way it was designed. The upstream or top of cliff work would mean fewer kids reaching the edge at all. It's not that everyone disagrees that the fence matters. In every planning meeting I've been part of, people nod vigorously when you say we need to fix this at the source. We need to be at the top of the cliff. Then the budget gets allocated to the valley anyway. The ambulance wins. Question worth sitting with is why? Because it's not stupidity and it's not bad intentions, it's it's it's something just more structural and more fixable than that. A downstream or top of cliff or bottom of cliff fix wins for three reasons, and they're worth talking about here. Because you can't fight a force you haven't identified. One, it's more visible. An intervention block is a thing you can point to. It shows up on a master schedule, it has a roster, it has a room number. We strengthen the conceptual coherence of our tier one instruction just doesn't fit on the slide the same way we serve 240 students in intervention this year does. It's more fundable, is number two. Ambulances attract money. Intervention dollars, grant lines, emergency allocations, student-facing resources. They flow towards the visible crisis, not the quiet prevention. A fence is a one-time line item or a continued line item that isn't as sexy. It's it's it's easy to cut when the budget gets tightened. An ambulance feels like a moral obligation. Number three, it's more politically satisfying. When a board member, a parent, or superintendent asks, What are we doing about math? The ambulance is the answer that lands. It's the signals the action, it signals care. The fence slow, top of cliff or upstream, it's invisible for a year or two, signals nothing in the short term. Even though it's the thing that actually drains the river. It's the thing that prevents the cliff. So smart, caring people, working hard, keep choosing the ambulance. Not because they're wrong about the fence, but because the system rewards the rescue and ignores the prevention. Here's where it gets interesting for math leaders, specifically because the ambulance trap is really a measurement trap wearing a budget costume. Think about how most districts measure whether their math work is working. Year-end, state, or provincial test scores. That's a lagging indicator. It arrives months after the instruction happened. It's it's shaped by dozens of variables outside of the control of what you're doing. It shows up far too late to course correct anything. It's good, don't get me wrong, it's it's good for long-term trend data. It's like trying to improve your diet by by stepping on a scale once a year, though. When you when your only feedback signal is that slow and not noisy, you literally cannot tell whether the fence is working. The fence takes a year or two to show up and test data. And by then you've stopped paying attention. The ambulance, on the other hand, produces immediate, countable, visible numbers. Students served, sessions run, programs deployed, so you keep funding the thing you can see. The way out is to measure the fence directly. Stop waiting for the lagging scale and start watching leading indicators. Street data the upstream instructional shifts you can actually observe in classrooms next week, not next spring. Is tax is test selection improving? Is mathematical discourse increasing? Are teachers using representations more flexibly? Are kids getting conceptual foundations before procedures? Those are observables. We can build a walkthrough tool, take a baseline in September, return in January, return in May. Suddenly your fence becomes a visible as visible as your ambulance, and it can finally compete for the budget. There's one more reason leaders abandon the fence, and it's it's it's most human of all, I would say. It's slow and it feels like failure. The research is is sobering here. The the work of you and colleagues in a study in the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Educational Sciences found that teachers who receive an average of 49 hours of sustained professional development saw their students gain about 21% total points. Well, a one-off workshop showed no measurable effect. Building the fence is exactly that kind of work. Putting the system into place to support sustained professional development, it's not sexier, it's not flashy, it compounds slowly and then dramatically. But the slowly part is where most districts lose their nerve, they climb back down into the valley and start staffing the ambulance again. This is the flywheel versus pendulum problem we often talk about. The fence is flywheel work, and the ambulance is what you reach for every time the flywheel feels too slow to be working. It is working, it just doesn't photograph well in October. You you're not you're just not measuring the right things to tell you it's working. You don't tear down the ambulance. Let's be clear about that. That's not the answer here. There are kids in the valley right now, and pulling them up is non-negotiable. Abandoning intervention to go build a fence is in its own kind of malpractice. This is both this is a a both and and not an either or. But this week you can start tilting the balance to the top of the cliff or upstream. Find one ambulance line in your budget and ask the fence question. For every dollar going into rescue, is there in a proportional dollar going to prevention? To tier one coherence, to teach your content knowledge, to shared instructional vision. If the ratio is ninety-five to five, that's your signal. Here's another one. Make one fence indicator visible. Pick a single top of cliff or upstream instructional shift. Build a way to observe it, and start reporting it with the same confidence you report invention numbers. Give the fence a slide on its own. Number three, name the trap out loud in your next planning meeting. Tell the ambulance story, watch the room nod, and then ask the question that breaks the spell. So why does our budget say the opposite? The town and the poem never built the fence. Let's be clear. But you're not the town. You're the one person in the meeting who can see the whole cliff. And who knows that the most important math work you'll do this year is the work that, for a while, no one will be able to see at all. If you want to jump start, you can head down to the links below. We've got a few resources to get you started around a math coherence compass. There's a link there to book a call with our team to see if you'd like to start thinking about how to build that fence. All right, make math moments community. That's it for today. High five for us.

SPEAKER_01 12:00

And a high five for you.