Upending math classes in Rigby has been messy but worthwhile, says school official
Published at | Updated at
Carly Flandro, Idaho Ed News
RIGBY (Idaho Ed News) — As a Rigby High instructional coach, Levi Jaynes was appalled at the math scores.
In 2018, only about a third of students who took the state’s standardized math exam were at grade level or higher.
Jaynes had moved to Rigby from Virginia, where he says he would have been fired from his math teaching position if his students’ scores were so low.
So he set out to make a change.
It’s been a “super messy” process, said Jaynes, who is now the school’s assistant principal. But it’s working — last spring, more than half of students were at grade level in math. That’s a 20 percentage point improvement in six years.
Many puzzle pieces have fallen into place to make that happen. Dedicated teachers have upended how they teach math, students spend more time in math classes and with more diverse classmates, and school leaders have crafted a culture of taking standardized tests seriously.
It’s not a perfect system — there’s still a math achievement gap between Hispanic students and economically disadvantaged students and their peers, and teacher turnover is a perennial issue.
But the school’s math teachers keep charging forward, taking risks and innovating to ensure students are learning math “slowly and deeply,” as Jaynes says.
Their goals are lofty.
“Math gives me hope that the world’s problems have solutions,” said teacher Kristen Montague. And she aims to pass that worldview onto her students.
Montague wants her students — whom she refers to as mathematicians — to leave her classroom with the confidence of “innovative problem solvers” who can tackle any conundrum.
A math class where traditional teaching is upended
In a recent Rigby High geometry class, students were learning how to calculate a shape’s interior angles.
It’s a classic geometry lesson, but the way it was taught was markedly different.
Traditionally, a math lesson went like this: the teacher writes a formula on the board, shows students how to use it, then assigns practice problems to be completed in class or at home.
But that kind of teaching led to surface-level math understanding — memorizing formulas and following procedural instructions.
Now, teachers begin the lesson with a question and encourage students to figure out how to solve it by experimenting.
On a recent Tuesday, teacher Emily Wasemiller asked students about different shapes’ interior angles, and prodded them to seek out patterns between the number of sides a shape has and the sum of those angles.
Instead of working individually at their desks, students were up at the whiteboard, working in groups, drawing triangles within a polygon to think about its angles. They repeated that process with different shapes.
And eventually, they arrived at the formula: “n – 2 (180),” where n represents the number of a shape’s sides.
They spent much more time getting there than if the teacher just wrote it on the board. But this way, they had a deeper understanding of it.
“Education is not individualistic — it’s communal.”
Jaynes refers to this as inquiry-based learning, and at Rigby High, they’ve reworked the curriculum in two of three main math classes — Algebra I and Geometry — so lessons are taught in this more interactive way. Next, they hope to do the same with Algebra II.
Making the change isn’t always easy for teachers; it’s different than how they were taught. And it requires vulnerability — math teachers who learned formulas through memorization rather than experimenting may not understand the theory behind formulas at first, so are learning alongside their students.
And when teachers are squeezed for time, there’s a tendency to revert back to the ‘formula, demonstrate, practice’ routine of teaching. Jaynes said they have to get teachers to “burn the boat,” or permanently abandon the old way of doing things.
With a revolving door of math teachers, there’s constantly new staff to win over. But the school’s veteran math teachers have worked to ease the transition for newcomers, including by creating interactive notebooks for students, which they call math toolkits, that go along with lessons.
“The commitment those teachers have to their students’ performance, that really makes the difference,” Jaynes said.
Getting teachers and students to care about state exams
The new way of teaching seems to be helping. Rigby’s math proficiency levels have increased by 20 percentage points — from 34% in 2018 to 54% in 2024 — according to data from the Idaho Standards Achievement Test.
But the improvement is also due to changing the culture around testing, Jaynes said.
Some of it was a matter of simple scheduling — students used to be pulled out of class to take the ISAT, so some would rush through the test so they wouldn’t miss too much. Now, there’s a week set aside to focus on testing.
Another factor was staff and student buy-in. The ISAT doesn’t have a direct effect on students — it doesn’t impact whether they can advance to the next grade level, their grade point average, or their ability to graduate.
It also doesn’t impact teachers’ pay or job status, like it did for Jaynes back in Virgina.
But the exam results carry gravity in another way.
Every year, the state superintendent has to stand in front of legislators and ask for more money for public education. If test scores are “garbage,” legislators aren’t going to invest, Jaynes said.
The ISAT absolutely matters “because the people who hold the purse strings look at that data,” Jaynes said. “Whether you like it or not, that’s the game we’re playing.”
So, Jaynes started talking about the scores more often and sharing data with staff. From them, it trickles down to students. Now, administrators and teachers talk to students about test scores from the first assembly on.
And the school made one more change: they increased the required amount of time in core math classes — like algebra and geometry — to three trimesters instead of two.
That helped staff show students their scores matter — low scores led to another trimester in math class.
Still, math scores are not the end goal.
Math labels are out, communal learning is in
In most Rigby High math classes, there are students with a wide range of ability levels. And that’s by design, Jaynes said.
Students who struggle with math benefit from learning alongside high-achieving peers — and vice versa. High-achieving students learn to slow down when they’re learning math, which is good “because math is not about learning stuff fast. It’s about learning deeply,” Jaynes said. And students who struggle might get ideas of how to solve a problem from a peer, and see an example of a successful student’s time management and study habits.
“Education is not individualistic — it’s communal,” Jaynes said. “I can learn something from you and you can learn something from me and we can learn something together. That’s the whole premise.”
Having these diverse classrooms also helps stem what Montague calls “math trauma,” or negative experiences in math class that can ding students’ confidence. When students aren’t labeled or sorted into classes by ability level, they’re less likely to self-limit — and that’s another major goal of the math program.
“We don’t want kids to make decisions about their careers (impacted by) a fear of math,” Jaynes said.
In other words, a student who wants to be an engineer shouldn’t be deterred by the prospect of math classes.
There are other ways to keep labels off, too. Special education teachers and aides who are helping students in general math classes make sure to help all students so those with disabilities aren’t so easily identified by their peers.
There are still some kinks to work out — the school has math intervention classes that struggling students take in addition to their regular math class. And there is only room in the classes for students who really need them.
Montague tries to shift the narrative about the classes by presenting them as a way to never have to take home math homework, and to get it done with a teacher at your side.
There are other sticking points in the school’s math program.
While Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students have improved their math achievement, there are still gaps between them and their peers. Math teachers are also revamping the way they grade, and trying to create more opportunities for students to take elective math classes tied to career interests.
Their program is seeing successes, but it’s still a work in progress.
But, Jaynes said, “we’re headed in the right direction.”
Originally posted on IdahoEdNews.org on March 18, 2025.
EastIdahoNews.com comment boards are a place for open, honest, and civil communication between readers regarding the news of the day and issues facing our communities. We encourage commenters to stay on topic, use positive and constructive language, and be empathetic to the feelings of other commenters. THINK BEFORE YOU POST. Click here for more details on our commenting rules.