One Classroom, Twenty Teachers

During first period on a Monday morning in February, Martin and his classmates settle themselves at tables of four and immediately get to work. At the start of every class, students have “flex time” to check homework or work on quiz corrections or a warm-up problem that builds upon the previous day’s work. Ms. Zunkiewicz circles the room, asking quiet questions to keep conversations moving. “How are we doing here? This is all you’ve got?” she teases. “Talk about it. Think about it.”

The table groups are carefully selected to pair students with complementary strengths and weaknesses, so they’ll be able to support each other effectively. Ms. Zunkiewicz experiments with groupings in the beginning of the year, but once she gets them right, she says, they stay that way.

In many respects, the groups are at the heart of Ms. Zunkiewicz’s classroom culture—and one of her most important teaching strategies. Because besides those quiet, guiding questions—the result of the meticulous planning she does in advance of every lesson and her deep knowledge of both her content and her students’ needs—Ms. Zunkiewicz barely says anything during class. Her students do all the work.

This means Ms. Zunkiewicz’s math class looks very different from her students’ previous math classes. It’s not just that the teacher does less talking. In Ms. Zunkiewicz’s room, students themselves are actually discovering how to do high-level math as they go along, using their prior knowledge, their classmates’ ideas, and their best guesses.

This is an approach she adopted just a year ago, after watching a middle school science teacher use it in a video on the Teaching Channel, where she gets a lot of ideas. Rather than stuffing graded quizzes in their backpacks and never looking at them again, students are forced to revisit the content until they really understand it.

While she doesn’t give them points back on their quizzes for the corrections, Ms. Zunkiewicz believes her students get more out of the assessment process this way.

This is also one of the many ways Ms. Zunkiewicz turns her students into teachers. At one table, four young women go over their quiz results together. Jamaris Rivera, 16, who missed the test and will have to retake it, isn’t checked out of the lesson, as one might be in a classroom where students take less active teaching roles. Instead, she nudges her partner, Michaela Frasier, through a tough problem, until they both hit a roadblock.

Ms. Zunkiewicz pauses at Michaela’s shoulder. “I’m trying to think,” says Michaela, 17, explaining where she and Jamaris got stuck. “If this is negative two cosine squared, would that turn into…this?”

Ms. Zunkiewicz considers the girls’ work. “So is that a positive two, or a negative two?”

“These kids know this isn’t the top school in the county. They’re talked about in ways they shouldn’t be talked about,” Ms. Zunkiewicz says. “When they find out they’re number one, it’s like, ‘See, I told you!’”

The high bar also pays off for many students for whom the lessons of math class extend to other subjects and, indeed, the rest of their lives.\

She doesn’t give us the answer. Even though it may frustrate us, it’s better for the long run.

– Noe Garza, 18

Noe Garza, 18, is a senior in Ms. Zunkiewicz’s AP Calculus class. Soft-spoken and modest, he says he’s always been “above average” at math—his favorite subject—but he wasn’t always a high achiever. In his early years in high school, Noe hung out with a large group of friends, most of whom are no longer in school. But since Noe joined Ms. Zunkiewicz’s class for pre-calculus, he says she’s pushed him to stay on track.

“I haven’t been in trouble for the last two years,” he says. “Ms. Zunkiewicz sets the bar really high for us. She believes in me, so I went out to try to do what I had to do to fulfill my potential.”

How did Noe go from a student who did “lazy work,” as he calls it, to AP Calculus and college applications? He’d always set his sights on college, but it wasn’t clear to him that he’d get there.

“That was always my goal,” he says assuredly. “High school’s not enough for me, I believe. But I have a lot going on, and it’s really hard.”

Working long hours outside school—Noe works at a retirement community, serving and bussing tables—makes it a challenge to keep up with his course work. Now, the stakes are even higher. Noe and his girlfriend recently welcomed a baby girl, Ilee Rose.

“I look forward to getting a degree, and then getting a job right away and making money,” he says. “I always wanted that, but having a daughter made me hungrier.”

It wasn’t until Noe had mastered the challenges of pre-calculus that he thought he could tackle the AP course. “I always heard of it, but I never thought I would reach that. This is my first AP class.”

His mother and his teacher agree that Noe is capable of doing higher-level math and achieving his goals for his education and his career. “Ms. Zunkiewicz says the sky’s the limit for me,” Noe says. “She’s just trying to get me there.”

Now, Noe is a role model for his four younger brothers, three of whom are already coming up behind him at Lennard. His mother says the example he’s setting for her younger boys is shifting the tide for the next generation of their family.

“He’s starting a new cycle where it’s okay to apply yourself at school, it’s normal to go to college. I want that to be a normal thing in my family.”

To help her son and his girlfriend reach their goals, Ms. Martinez is helping out with the baby. She has even higher hopes for Ilee Rose. “I want ten times more for my granddaughter,” she says.

As for the friends he used to hang out with, Noe is reflective, choosing not to judge his friends for choices that are different from his own. But he’s not interested in changing his trajectory. “Everybody goes their own paths. I’m the only one on my path. I don’t really have time for a lot of friends anymore. I’ve got things to handle at home. I’m doing my thing.”

Doing that “thing” is paying off. On this otherwise average Monday, Noe has good news to share.

“I got a text from my mom. It was a picture of the email, saying, ‘Congratulations, you’ve been accepted.’ Next year I’m going to University of South Florida for an engineering degree.”

For his mother, it’s a dream many years in the making.

“It’s a goal I had many years ago, and he attained it, regardless of the situation. He made it,” says Ms. Martinez. “You can only do so much for your kids. It’s up to them to take the baton and run.”

They’ll also be better able to apply their knowledge when solving new problems, like they’ll need to do when using math in the real world. Those three pieces—conceptual understanding, procedural skill and fluency, and application—are the dimensions of “rigor” demanded by college and career readiness standards, like the ones Florida adopted in 2010.

In math, the standards also define eight Standards of Mathematical Practice, which describe the ways students should engage with math as they develop. These remain consistent throughout grades K-12, while content-specific standards are divvied up by grade. The practice standards require that students are able to, for example, “make sense of problems and persevere in them,” “reason abstractly and quantitatively,” and “construct arguments and critique the reasoning of others.”

Ms. Zunkiewicz says these eight practices are “exactly what I do in my classroom every day.” As students are talking about math in their groups, they are taking ownership over their learning and improving their understanding of the underlying concepts.

This is a fundamentally different—and perhaps counterintuitive—way to teach math. Rather than lecturing students from the front of the room and having them plug numbers into formulas, Ms. Zunkiewicz demands that her students build on their understanding of previous content to develop knowledge on a new topic.

That’s important because college and career readiness standards in math place a much greater focus on coherence than previous math standards did—meaning that students gain knowledge at each grade level that builds upon the knowledge they developed in the grade before.

Her classmate Ethan Noe, 17, concurs. “There’s that expectation of excellence, but with the grace you need to feel like you can ask questions.”

Ethan calls Ms. Zunkiewicz’s class a “positive challenge,” because of the extra level of thinking she demands of him and his classmates. “It’s like, wow, we’re actually really learning something,” Ethan says. “You feel a little bit smarter.”

For Michaela, math has become something she and her friends chat about outside class. “We get out of class and we’re talking about pre-calculus. In other classes, we just go onto the next subject.”

Ms. Zunkiewicz says Michaela particularly struggled at the start of the year—that it was hard for her to experience a teacher who would not give her the answers.

Today, Michaela’s come around. Asked what it’s like when she and her classmates work their own way through a tough concept to true mastery, Michaela doesn’t hesitate.

“It’s a sensational feeling.”

And what of her classmate Martin Rangel, now six months into the pre-calculus course he begged to get out of? “I ask a lot more questions now than I used to. In her class, I thought everything was hard at the beginning. Now I feel like I do belong. I can go beyond what I thought I could do because of this class.”

I can go beyond what I thought I could do because of this class.

– Martin Rangel, 17​