The energy in alum Steve Campanella’s middle school geometry class is positive, collaborative—even joyful.

Education & Social Service

Changing the Equation

An innovative BU Wheelock program aims to keep kids interested in math long past elementary school

Backlit by the soft yellow of the overhead projector, Steve Campanella stands in front of a classroom of sixth graders seated at desks in clusters of twos and threes. Campanella (Wheelock’24) is leading a geometry lesson about three-dimensional solids called polyhedra. It’s the last period of a gorgeous day in late April, yet each set of tween eyes is trained on the teacher as he breaks a polyhedron—a rectangular prism—into its parts and guides the students to find the area for each. Hands shoot up as he shouts out questions.

“Excellent,” he repeats as students correctly add the areas of the parts together to find the total surface area of the prism. “You got it.”

The energy is positive, collaborative, even joyful—decidedly not what you would expect to see in a middle school math class at the end of a beautiful spring day, when attention spans should be bottoming out. But then, this is not the way math is ordinarily taught.

With the problem solved, Campanella, a first-year teacher at the John F. Kennedy Middle School in Waltham, Mass., pulls out a 3D model to show the class how it folds up to become the prism polyhedron they’ve been working with. One girl gives her table partner a high five in celebration.

Throughout the 53-minute period, the lesson alternates between interactive instruction and bite-size chunks of group work, during which Campanella and two aides stroll among the desks to provide help and occasional redirection.

Where math curricula of yesteryear were all about the pursuit of finding an answer the “right way,” Campanella—who has a Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) in mathematics education from Wheelock College of Education & Human Development—designs his classes around student needs, contributions, and, yes, joy. He does this by getting students talking to each other and to him, sharing their strategies and thinking about the concepts they’re learning.

“It’s been a totally different way of viewing math, which is tough for me as a teacher because I’m learning as I’m teaching,” Campanella says. “But I can see it bringing in kids who said in the beginning of the year, ‘This is going to be hell for the school year.’ But they’re coming on board and enjoying it, which has been wonderful to see.”

This approach didn’t happen in a vacuum. Campanella learned it in his graduate studies at BU—and specifically during his participation in the Joy & Justice in Mathematics Teaching and Learning Project, a collaboration between Wheelock and the College of Arts & Sciences that is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation–funded Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program.

The Joy & Justice project, which runs through the 2029 academic year, fully funds Wheelock math education MAT students—like Campanella—who commit to becoming educators in a high-need school district for at least two years, provides them with mentorship for three years, and supports retention for new teachers in education. The new teachers participate in regular seminars where they learn and share ways to increase joy and discourse and to integrate a deeper understanding of social justice issues, like racism, into their math classes.

“We’re really focused on, as a base level, helping students get better in mathematics,” says Ale Salinas, a Wheelock clinical associate professor of mathematics, “but we’re expanding it to be not just about students’ GPA success in mathematics. It’s [also about] their dispositions, their beliefs about themselves as math learners.”

Bringing Back the Joy

The United States consistently ranks in the middle of the pack among developed countries in math scores, according to the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), an assessment that has been administered since the early 1990s. In the 2023 TIMSS assessment, the US ranked 22nd out of 63 participating education systems for fourth grade mathematics and 20th out of 45 systems for eighth grade mathematics. It was a significant dip from the last time TIMSS was administered—pre-pandemic, in 2019—dropping the US to 1995 levels.

But Wheelock mathematics faculty say that the more instructive data point, perhaps, is elsewhere in the TIMSS assessment—where fourth and eighth graders were asked about their attitudes toward math. Every TIMSS assessment in recent memory has shown that the further students progress in their math learning, the less enjoyment and confidence they feel about math. In the 2023 assessment, 72 percent of fourth graders said they like math “very much” or “somewhat,” but by eighth grade that number dropped to just 49 percent. When asked about how confident they felt in math, 67 percent of US fourth graders reported feeling “very or somewhat confident” compared to 48 percent of eighth graders—putting the country 29th out of 43 countries assessed.

Wheelock faculty say interest may drop off over time because, as math classes become more advanced, they can also become less fun and feel less relevant to students. Where a fourth grader may see the value in counting M&M’s or building block structures to learn a lesson, an eighth grader might be more skeptical about why solving long word problems and slogging through pages of busywork is meaningful.

The TIMSS statistics are worth noting. Educators say the better students feel about themselves as math learners, the more successful they’ll be in the classroom. That’s the goal of the current Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program, which funded the Joy & Justice project.

Since 2002, the Noyce program has provided funding to institutions of higher education for scholarships, stipends, and programmatic support so they can recruit and prepare STEM majors and professionals to become K–12 teachers in high-need districts. Each year since 2007, Wheelock has funded around seven full-tuition Noyce scholars— prospective teachers completing their MAT who will teach in high-need districts.

Past Noyce grants have focused on integrating engineering in the classroom and introducing classroom discourse during math lessons. The goal of the current grant is to support student achievement, interest, and confidence in mathematics—for longer—by designing joyful moments in the classroom. That’s the backbone of the Joy & Justice project. 

“[Joy] is not just something that is accidental in the classroom, but it’s also something intentional,” says Aaron Brakoniecki, a Wheelock senior lecturer and program director in mathematics education. “It can be designed for, and we can now move the needle with more attention to it.”

Noyce scholars receive full tuition support to complete their MAT in math education, which takes most students a year. They commit to teaching in a high-need district for at least two academic years following graduation, and agree to participate in workshops in which they continue their learning, sharing their teaching experiences—such as students who had an aha moment or exhibited joy with the material—and designing experiences for their classrooms.

The justice component of the curriculum involves an emphasis on making connections between math and social issues that matter to students, like systemic inequities, while also acknowledging that there are many sociological and familial reasons why a student may fall behind in math and other subjects. Hence the focus on forming student identities as math learners through joy.

“The more joyful experiences we create, the better their mathematical identities will be,” Salinas says. “The better mathematical identities, the more likely they will want to continue in math, want to go into math fields, to like math, to achieve in math, to try and engage in math. So joy in the math classroom is a form of justice.”

“I’m a Mathematician Now” 

Before enrolling in Wheelock’s MAT program in 2023, Campanella spent 11 years in product development and pricing strategy at insurance and tire companies. Teaching middle school became a career goal of his in part because he understands the challenges of those middle school years personally. He attempted suicide as an adolescent, and the struggles he remembers facing back then never left him. “I’ve always had this voice in the back of my head to go back to middle school and help these kids be kids and enjoy this age, where there’s so much happening from a social, mental, emotional, physical standpoint,” he says.

Now teaching sixth and eighth grade classes at a school where more than half of students speak a language at home other than English and one in three is considered low-income, Campanella looks for ways to make lessons accessible. To teach systems of equations, he had students write their own equations based on a comparison of cell phone plans, which he says was “by far the best lesson I’ve had with my eighth graders. It’s one I’m looking forward to for next year.”

He used pizzas or flower pots to teach the notoriously difficult division of fractions. He sees breakthroughs in his students regularly. One student finally understood how to divide fractions because she associated the object lessons with her own experience planting flower gardens as a kid, eventually declaring from the back of the classroom, “I’m a mathematician now.” Another student told Campanella that he’d made math fun for him again.

Campanella has sought advice from Salinas and regularly shares stories and tips with fellow Noyce scholars. Other alums of the Joy & Justice program have gone on to teach in districts throughout the region, and Brakoniecki says most stay well past the required two years. “We know that if we can keep teachers in the profession for three years, they are much more likely to become longtime teachers,” he adds.

Classrooms like Campanella’s might be what it takes to change the perception of math in America and reverse national rankings that appear to be ticking downward. He credits his Wheelock graduate program and the Noyce scholarship for shifting his perception of what math education could be.

“It’s given me hope,” he says. “That’s a big reason why I wanted to be a part of Noyce and Wheelock, because it was unlike anything I had ever heard before. With the number of teachers that were leaving the profession when I was coming in, it was scary. So I wanted to bring some new energy into the education world.”