Published: April 25, 2025
I believe the relationship between coaching player development on a team sport is similar in important ways to the relationship between math instruction and student learning. I propose that by examining the ways in which the top soccer coaches and soccer organizations develop their players, we can reimagine the ways in which we might better approach math instruction in our school districts.
Soccer is a helpful analogy context for me because I’ve played my whole life and I know and understand the game deeply. Throughout my youth, I played in strong soccer clubs with amazing coaches. I’ve coached within those same organizations. I continue to play and coach. My experiences learning, playing, and coaching soccer have impacted the ways in which I think about math instruction and student learning.
Soccer is a useful analogy for our math classrooms and instruction because soccer is a player’s sport. This means once the game begins, it belongs to the players’ decisions. A soccer coach can’t impact the game during play as much as a football coach can for example. It is the players’ independent decision-making, problem-solving and teamwork that determines the outcome of the game. A soccer coach’s primary impact on her players is made during practices.
In too many classrooms, math educators are acting like football coaches: interjecting our thinking into every play on the field, telling students how to solve their math problems. Maybe this is because our programs make us feel like we have to be. What we actually need is an entire system of soccer coaches who all have the same coaching guide.
Big concepts, like defense and offense, goal-scoring and tackling, dribbling and passing, are developed across a soccer player’s entire career. Youth coaches understand the ways in which the smaller 3v3, 5v5, and 7v7 games will build understanding and context for the bigger, more complex 11v11 formations that players are expected to learn beginning around middle school. This progression in soccer relates to the ways in which big concepts in math about numbers and the operations (adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing) are developed across a math learner’s entire learning career.
Coaches of younger players (who play on smaller fields) have a deep understanding of how a small triangle shape of three players will expand to be the foundational way in which players think about support and spacing on the professional size field with 11 players. Math teachers at all levels should have a similar familiarity with the way in which visual models can be used throughout a students’ educational journey to build understanding across concepts especially as the math gets more complex. Like youth soccer coaches, math teachers must understand how the visual models of the present build on visual models from prior skills and concepts and provide important foundational knowledge for the more complex concepts in subsequent grades.
All Learners Network (ALN) is building a network of educators who operate like soccer coaches in our classrooms. The All Learners Lesson Structure is how we run our practices. The High Leverage Concept (HLC) maps and HLC Progressions are like a coaching guide to help prioritize the models and strategies that will best support our students’ growth.
The HLC Maps and HLC Progressions are meant to be a coaching guide for EVERY math educator in a school system. There is power in everyone operating from the same guidebook. The goal of our HLC resources is to help every educator be the best coach possible to their students, regardless of each student’s readiness levels or skill development needs. We hoped to create a resource that helps each educator provide the “just in time, just for me” feedback that all of your students need to grow and develop along the HLC Progressions.
Our free HLC resources represent the thinking and work of hundreds of elementary school teachers, math coaches, and math leaders. Their overriding goal was to create a system of linked concepts to guide teachers to provide greater equity to their students. We hope that as these concepts are implemented, the thinking and performance of elementary math students will evolve so that we can honestly say that every child can do math.
Click here for the printable version.
What Now?
1. Read through the HLC Resources for your grade level, and the previous grade levels, to see how students' conceptual understanding develops.
2. Read our blog “MTSS and the All Learners Lesson Structure” to understand how creates space for all students.
3. Bring All Learners Network (ALN) into your school or district for embedded professional development.
All Learners Network is committed to a new type of math instruction. We focus on supporting pedagogy so that all students can access quality math instruction. We do this through our online platform, free resources, events, and embedded professional development. Learn more about how we work with schools and districts here.
