When Every Initiative Feels Urgent: Helping Teachers Choose What Matters Most

Estimated Read Time: 6 minutes 

At Teachers College Advancing Literacy, our team of staff developers has spent decades working alongside literacy coaches and the teachers they support. Instructional coaches are often the ones standing in the gap between a district's initiative rollouts and what a teacher can actually absorb, and we hear the same tension from nearly every coach we work with: the desire to help, and the challenge of finding an entry point when the teacher in front of them is holding too much at once.

It's a scene coaches describe to us often. A second-grade teacher, during a prep period, sorting through unanswered parent emails, a new civics curriculum, a new text set of books to support small group instruction, a vocabulary routine from last week's PD, and a sticky note reminding him that progress-monitoring data is due before Friday's grade-level meeting. He looks up and says, "I don't know which of these to do first. They all feel required." Coaches see versions of this constantly. It comes from a system that adds initiatives faster than it retires them, so teachers end up holding several priorities at once, each with its own urgency and its own believer somewhere in the building.

Why Everything Feels Urgent at Once

New curriculum adoptions, testing windows, and administrative priorities tend to stack rather than replace one another. A teacher can be three years into a curriculum shift, mid-cycle on a new assessment tool, and fresh out of a PD session on discourse moves, leaving all these priorities feeling a bit like a game of pedagogical Jenga. Each initiative makes sense in isolation, but together, they compete for the same forty-five minutes of planning time.

Researcher and author Douglas Reeves has a name for this pattern: the Law of Initiative Fatigue (Reeves, 2010). Reeves argues that when a school or district keeps adding initiatives while time, money, and emotional energy stay fixed, each new initiative ends up with a smaller share of a teacher's attention than the one before it, no matter how well the initiative was designed. The problem is rarely any single program. It's that schools add new priorities far more often than they retire old ones, so the pile only grows. Reeves makes a similar case, freely available, in his Educational Leadership column "Pull the Weeds Before You Plant the Flowers" (Reeves, 2006).

A coach's role in this moment is to help a teacher see the full list clearly and choose rather than add on new priorities. 

A Framework for Choosing One Thing

Jim Knight's research on instructional coaching offers a useful starting point here. In his book The Impact Cycle, Knight argues that coaching goals work best when they are narrowed to a single, well-defined target rather than spread across everything a teacher is working on (Knight, 2018). He describes this as a PEERS goal: powerful, easy, emotionally compelling, reachable, and student-focused. The goal doesn't come from the coach's checklist. It comes from what the teacher and coach agree will make the clearest difference for students right now, and everything else waits its turn. The Instructional Coaching Group has a free breakdown of the framework in "Getting to a PEERS Goal", including a downloadable checklist.

A coach who helps a teacher pick one goal is helping her decide what she can act on this month, so the other three items on her desk stop competing for attention she doesn't have.

The Emotional Side of Prioritizing

Of course, choosing one initiative over three (or thirty-three!) others is not purely a logistics problem. It also touches how a teacher feels about the initiatives she sets aside, and that emotional weight is part of what makes prioritizing so hard in the moment.

Elena Aguilar's work on educator resilience speaks directly to this. In Onward: Cultivating Emotional Resilience in Educators, Aguilar frames resilience partly as a matter of directing limited energy toward the highest-leverage work rather than spreading it evenly across every demand (Aguilar, 2018). One tool she returns to often in her coaching practice is sorting what's in a teacher's sphere of control, what's in her sphere of influence, and what sits outside both. A new district mandate might sit outside a teacher's control entirely. How she sequences her own planning time this month sits well inside it. Visualizing and naming this can ease some of the pressure a teacher feels to treat every item on her list as equally hers to solve. 

What This Looks Like in a Coaching Conversation

It’s worth having a few moves in your coaching toolbox to help facilitate prioritization, especially when overwhelming feelings set in: 

• Ask the teacher to name, out loud, everything currently pulling at her attention. Writing the list down often reduces its weight on its own.

• Sort the list into three buckets: what needs attention this month, what can wait until next quarter, and what belongs to someone else's timeline, not hers.

• Sort a second time using Aguilar's sphere of control and sphere of influence. Separate what the teacher can act on directly from what she can only nudge, and set the rest aside as outside her reach for now.

• Anchor the choice in a student, not a mandate. A goal tied to a specific group of readers or a specific skill gap tends to feel more compelling than one tied to a compliance deadline.

• Name what the teacher is choosing not to do right now, and say plainly that this is a holding pattern rather than a permanent decision. 

• Follow up on the single goal before introducing anything new. Coming back to goals in an ongoing way allows you both to celebrate progress and build trust as you gain traction together. 

The Coach's Job Is Also to Say No to More

Coaches sometimes feel pressure to bring something new to every visit, as if a coaching cycle without a fresh strategy has failed. The opposite is often true. A coach who protects a teacher's single priority, resists the pull to layer on another strategy, and measures progress against the one goal that was chosen is doing some of the most valuable work available in that role.

Building this kind of judgment takes more than a single coaching conversation. Our Leading Data-Driven Coaching for School Progress: Leverage Coaching Cycles and Systems for School-Wide Literacy Excellence is a five-day course for K-8 coaches and literacy leaders, running October 2026 through May 2027 with cohorts in person in NYC and online via Zoom. It works through how to design coaching cycles, read school data for patterns rather than isolated incidents, and build systems that keep a school's coaching effort focused rather than scattered across every initiative at once. Learn more and register.