By: Emily Banks

Schools rarely lack instructional priorities. The harder challenge is making those priorities concrete enough that teachers, coaches, and leaders share an understanding of what they should actually look like in classrooms.

Over the past year, Springpoint has been exploring that challenge through the Momentum Schools Initiative, a partnership with a small cohort of schools focused on strengthening instructional coaching.

As we reflect on year one successes and begin year two programming, one insight stands out clearly:

A shared, schoolwide instructional priority—paired with concrete classroom look-fors—can be a powerful driver of change.

In today’s school environments, leaders are navigating an ever-growing set of initiatives competing for time and attention. Amid this complexity, clarity matters. Our experience suggests that when schools articulate a focused instructional vision and align coaching, feedback, and systems to that vision, teachers are better supported in translating ideas into daily practice.

Through leader empathy interviews and classroom observations, we identified a central instructional goal for our cohort of partners: students owning the cognitive lift. Because this phrase can mean different things in different contexts, and translating it into concrete instructional practices can be elusive, we worked with schools to define what student ownership of the cognitive lift looks like across disciplines, lesson types, and curricula.

Drawing on the work of researchers behind The 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematical Discussions, we developed a cross-disciplinary framework we call the Launch–Monitor–Debrief (LMD) cycle:

• Launch – How a learning task is introduced to students
• Monitor – What the teacher attends to and responds to as students engage in the task
• Debrief – How student thinking is surfaced and used to consolidate learning

While inspired by mathematics pedagogy, LMD has proven valuable across content areas. We know strong instructional practices often transcend disciplines, and a shared framework can unify a school’s approach more effectively than a collection of subject-specific strategies.

Importantly, these are not new or additional tasks. Teachers already launch, monitor, and stepback, often multiple times within a single lesson. What shifts is the intentionality behind these moves and their potential to place deeper thinking in students’ hands, rather than defaulting to what Peter Liljedahl describes as “studenting.”

Even in these early stages, the impact of this clarity is evident in leader feedback:

• “We’ve essentially replaced a 20-page instructional playbook that no one used with something far more concrete and actionable.”
• “For the first time, our leadership team is aligned on what we’re looking for across classrooms.”
• “Teachers are starting to use the language of Launch–Monitor–Debrief to reflect on their own practice.”

As we move into year two, MSI is committed to continued support around this framework, working with leaders to build the systems and structures that allow teachers to grow their practice within a clear, shared framework.

Questions for Reflection

• What is the one instructional priority that anchors your school’s work—and how clearly is it understood across your community?
• How do you translate that priority into specific, observable classroom practices?
• Where might greater simplicity and shared language strengthen alignment across classrooms?

We’d love to continue this conversation. If these ideas resonate or if you’re exploring similar questions in your context, reach out to learn more about our work and how we can partner in supporting instructional coherence.