School-Wide Practice Change
Beyond the 60 Minutes: Redesigning Instructional Programs for Deep Mathematical Reasoning
Following the massive overhaul of literacy instruction across Indiana, attention is now moving toward mathematics. Between the enactment of early math screeners under House Bill 1634 and House Bill 1266’s focus on math instructional time, the message is clear: math proficiency is on Indiana’s mind.
With the 2026 ILEARN results for math hovering around a modest 42.7% statewide proficiency rate, there is a tremendous opportunity ahead for principals and superintendents to move the math performance needle more aggressively. But adjusting master schedules to accommodate additional instructional minutes is only the beginning. The larger question is what schools do with that time—and whether the systems surrounding teachers equip them to use it well.
Few people have a broader view of what drives student performance across education systems than Andreas Schleicher. As Director for Education and Skills at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and creator of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Schleicher has spent decades studying how students are taught and how education systems perform around the world. Data he shared in CELL’s recent webinar, Thinking About Math Education: Insights From Top-Performing Nations, raises important questions about how Indiana approaches this moment. More instructional time may be part of the solution, but lasting improvement will require us to look beyond the mandate to the system design itself.
Looking outside the U.S., we can see that high-performing nations aren't outscoring Indiana simply because they have a longer instructional block. They excel because they operate within a different organizational architecture—one that structures the work of teaching and learning differently.
Simply stretching a traditional worksheet-driven lesson to fill an hour is unlikely to produce the deeper conceptual understanding and mathematical reasoning the legislation is intended to support.
More Time Is Only the Beginning
Indiana HB 1266 requires a minimum of 60 minutes of daily Tier 1 math instruction in grades K-5, along with 20 minutes of math intervention for students who need additional support.
For many schools, carving out the additional intervention time may present the greater scheduling challenge. But meeting the new time expectations is only part of the equation.
The legislation creates more space for math instruction, but does not prescribe what that instruction should look like. Simply stretching a traditional worksheet-driven lesson to fill an hour is unlikely to produce the deeper conceptual understanding and mathematical reasoning the legislation is intended to support. To achieve stronger student outcomes, leaders must look beyond the number of minutes on the master schedule to what happens within those minutes—and what teachers need to make that instruction more effective.
That makes this more than a scheduling challenge. It is an opportunity to examine how the broader system supports better mathematics teaching and learning.
Make Time for Teachers, Too
In educational leadership, we can mistake individual teacher performance for system capacity. When the state introduces new implementation guidance, it can be tempting to focus primarily on teacher supervision and individual accountability metrics. However, true system capacity building requires shifting away from top-down control toward a structural redesign that fosters collective, lateral capacity across schools and professional networks (Hargreaves, 2011).
CELL’s webinar with Schleicher highlighted a striking international comparison. The U.S. and high-performing nations such as Japan devote comparable staffing resources to classroom education, but they deploy those resources differently. In the U.S., a greater emphasis on smaller class sizes means teachers spend nearly the entire workday in direct instruction, leaving little to no time for collaborative planning. By comparison, top-performing global nations utilize slightly larger classes and structure the day so teachers spend 40% to 45% of their time outside the classroom engaged in professional learning and planning.
The takeaway is not that Indiana schools should simply increase class sizes or attempt to replicate another country’s model. It is that how schools structure teachers’ time can be just as important as how they structure students’ time.
Principals know a master schedule is a powerful tool. Instead of just finding room for 60-minute math blocks, what if they restructured the time to create more opportunities for teachers to collaborate?
Effective system leaders build capacity by intentionally designing opportunities for shared learning, professional dialogue, and collaborative problem-solving across classrooms (Hargreaves, 2011). Prioritizing common planning windows or block schedules to protect that out-of-classroom time for collaborative work among grade-level teams could help develop true capacity, as our international counterparts have shown. When teachers have the structural space to engage in continuous lesson studies and collaboratively explore how a complex academic standard can be unpacked from multiple angles, the work during that required 60-minute math block fundamentally changes.
Protect Depth, Not the Pacing Guide
Creating capacity is only half of the equation. Leaders also need clarity about what teachers should do with that capacity—and what parts of the instructional system should remain flexible.
District leaders can adopt a new framework, select new materials and establish new expectations, but none of those decisions automatically determine the daily instructional decisions made inside individual classrooms. Organizational theorists describe schools as “loosely coupled” systems (Weick, 1976), meaning mandates from the statehouse or a district’s central office rarely change the daily micro-decisions made within the classroom. To lead successfully through a statewide transition, leaders must master strategic coupling—knowing what to hold tightly across classrooms and what to leave flexible (Spain & Woulfin, 2019).
In Indiana, we can sometimes get this backwards. We tightly couple the timeline—expecting every fourth grade teacher across a corporation to be on Lesson 4.2 by Thursday—while loosely coupling the cognitive depth, allowing instruction to drift toward passive procedural practice to stay on schedule.
High-performing international systems take a different approach. Schleicher’s comparisons point to a greater emphasis on deep conceptual understanding rather than surface-level routine application. Traditional U.S. math textbooks have been described as “a mile wide and an inch thick,” forcing students to rush through 20 to 30 isolated problems per lesson. Global peers focus intensely on a single mathematical idea or problem per lesson, exploring it from multiple angles and perspectives.
So, if you are a math department chair, building principal, curriculum director, or superintendent, what should you do?
Tighten instructional anchors
Leadership must ensure systemic alignment, anchoring every classroom to the specific core competencies students need to master. Teach students how to formulate, employ, and interpret mathematical tools in authentic, real-world contexts while giving teachers appropriate latitude in how students reach that understanding.
Build flexibility into pacing
If a rich, student-led mathematical discussion reveals important student thinking, teachers need the professional autonomy to slow down and pursue that learning rather than viewing the pacing guide as an inflexible finish line. Do not penalize educators for falling behind a district pacing guide if they are achieving deep conceptual mastery. This is not about disregarding curricular coherence but ensuring that pacing serves learning rather than allowing the calendar to become the primary measure of instructional success.
Make Math Matter Beyond School
In CELL’s webinar, Schleicher noted that mathematics tends to be uniquely “school-bound.” Too often, students experience math as something that makes sense within the environment of school rather than as a way of understanding and solving problems in the world around them.
If we want Hoosier students to develop true conceptual understanding and mathematical reasoning, additional instructional time cannot simply mean more opportunities to complete procedures. High-performing systems outside the U.S. tend to shift routine drills and fluency practice to homework, reserving valuable classroom time for students to develop a deeper understanding of mathematical concepts, including how and why they work. These countries prioritize giving students opportunities to wrestle with mathematical ideas, apply them in authentic contexts, explain their reasoning and consider multiple approaches to solving problems within the classroom.
The Indiana Department of Education’s Mathematics Frameworks ask educators to support productive struggle in learning math. This is an incredibly heavy lift.
Asking a teacher to move beyond primarily demonstrating procedures at the whiteboard and instead facilitating a room where students grapple with complex problems requires a different kind of instructional practice. It also requires teachers to become comfortable with learning that may not always look orderly.
If a principal walks into a classroom during an authentic reasoning lesson, it may look messy. Students might be debating approaches, sitting in extended silence as they think through a problem, or testing a mathematical hypothesis that ultimately proves incorrect.
Those moments aren’t necessarily signs that learning has broken down. They may be evidence that students are doing more of the intellectual work themselves.
Make It Safe to Teach Differently
This kind of shift asks teachers to take a professional risk.
Empirical research shows that instructional practices change significantly when school leaders intentionally cultivate trust, professionalism, and empowerment (Yalçın et al., 2025). When principals act as change agents who foster relational trust, teachers feel motivated to expand beyond mere compliance and genuinely innovate their classroom practices (Yalçın et al., 2025).
If a building’s culture relies heavily on compliance-driven walkthroughs, teachers may default to the safest, lowest-risk instructional method: writing procedures on the board and telling kids to memorize them.
To ensure teachers feel empowered to lead a thinking classroom rather than simply a compliant one, educational leaders must ensure that what they look for during classroom visits reflects that expectation.
- Stop looking only for: Absolute quiet, rapid-fire worksheet completion, or a teacher doing most of the talking.
- Start looking for: Student-to-student mathematical discourse, multiple problem-solving strategies displayed, and teachers asking open-ended questions, such as, “Why does that strategy work for this problem but not that one?”
When leaders debrief with teachers, they should celebrate the productive messiness that deeper mathematical reasoning requires. By doing so, they reinforce the message that the goal isn’t simply to cover mathematics but to help students think mathematically.
The real work is creating the conditions for teachers and students to make those 60 minutes matter.
Beyond the 60 Minutes
Indiana’s latest efforts to strengthen mathematics education create an opportunity to rethink what it will take to improve student outcomes. Yes, additional instructional time matters. But so does how those minutes are used and supported.
At CELL, we believe true mathematical mastery will not be achieved simply by doing more of the same. Improvement requires thinking differently about the systems that shape teaching and learning. By restructuring the school day to support authentic collaboration, anchoring instruction to deep conceptual learning rather than rigid calendars, and establishing professional trust in educators, Indiana can build the capacity for stronger student outcomes in mathematics while laying the foundation for progress across disciplines.
For leaders, the challenge is not finding 60 minutes on the master schedule. The real work is creating the conditions for teachers and students to make those 60 minutes matter.
Go Deeper: Watch the Full Webinar
Want to explore what Indiana can learn from the world’s highest-performing education systems? Watch CELL’s full webinar, Thinking About Math Education: Insights From Top-Performing Nations, featuring Andreas Schleicher for a deeper look at how leading systems approach mathematics—and what they can teach us about strengthening math education here at home
References
Hargreaves, D. H. (2011). System redesign for system capacity building. Journal of Educational Administration, 49(6), 685–700. https://doi.org/10.1108/09578231111174820
Spain, A., & Woulfin, S. (2019). Past, Present, and Future of Coupling as a Leadership Concept. In B. Johnson Jr. & S. D. Kruse (Eds.), Educational Leadership, Organizational Learning, and the Ideas of Karl Weick: Perspectives on Theory and Practice (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315114095
Weick, K. E. (1976). Educational Organizations as Loosely Coupled Systems. Administrative Science Quarterly, 21(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.2307/2391875
Yalçın, M. T., Atasoy, R., & Göçen, A. (2025). Trust, Professionalism and Empowerment: How School Leaders Shape Instructional Practices. European Journal of Education, 60(2), e70087. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.70087
