Maya McFadden Photo
Brzezinski mixing in-person and digital teaching at ESUMS; more than 20,000 people follow his instructional videos online.
Tim Brzezinski welcomes smart phones and TikTok when he’s teaching — both to his New Haven middle-school math classroom and to thousands of people around the globe who follow his videos online.
That’s because Brzezinski, who teaches at Engineering and Science University Magnet School (ESUMS), believes in a teaching method called “active student-centered discovery-based learning.” That means his students learn “graspable math” with the help of educational phone and computer apps.
Brzezinski then shares his own digital explorations in the classroom on social media to help other educators do the same.
He uses social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok to share his knowledge of ed tech with other educators around the world. Brzezinski has 13,800 followers on Twitter. On YouTube, he has 5,000 subscribers. On TikTok, he has 2,000 followers.
As evidenced by this reporter’s visit to Brzezinski’s classroom Monday morning, he uses a variety of apps to engage students daily and help them to creatively learn how to apply mathematics in real-life scenarios.
With more than a decade of teaching experience, and only a few weeks into his first academic year at ESUMS, Brzezinski clearly takes pride in trying to use educational technology, or “ed tech,” to enhance student learning and push the bounds of how to teach math.
Brzezinski: "Tech is not the solution to education's problems. It's how teachers use the tech."
Brzezinski’s third class of the day Monday began at 9:55 a.m. Nine students filed in and each grabbed a surface object — like a cup or a bowl — which they had measured the dimensions of last week.
As a class, Brzezinski led the group in a refresher on how to use students’ Chromebooks to plot and position coordinates on a 3D coordinate plane.
For the Monday cup modeling lesson, the students used last week’s measurements to plot the objects’ cross sections within a 3D coordinate plane.
Once they built their assigned surface of revolution, they then tested the accuracy of the 3D models that they had created with augmented reality on their phones.
Brzezinski described lessons like Monday’s as enhanced formative assessments.
Some of the students were able to finish plotting their cylinder-like models in less than 10 minutes. The class then moved onto a second task of creating two stacked composite surface models.
While students worked, Brzezinski answered questions and was able to monitor student engagement and progress online through the Geogebra application.
He said being able to watch students work in real time allows him to help students work through mistakes that aren’t always visible on paper.
The hour-long Monday lesson also taught students to better develop spatial awareness, Brzezinski said.
“As teachers, we cannot bury our heads in the sand like an ostrich and pretend that tech doesn’t exist, because it does,” he told this reporter after Monday’s class. “So, we need to adapt our teaching styles to have kids still think at a higher level with this technology. So, I use this technology to engage kids in that higher-level thinking.”
Put another way, Brzezinski said: “Tech is not the solution to education’s problems. It’s how teachers use the tech.”
"If The Kids Can Build It, I Know They Know It"
Brzezinski teaching -- and TikToking -- math class.
Tim Brzezinski Photo
Brzezinski previously worked as a high school educator in Berlin for 15 years. He resigned in 2017 to pursue math consulting.
Brzezinski traveled the country providing professional development to educators and administrators through his consulting company Brzezinski Math. He continues to do consulting part-time centered around ed tech.
“Math education is plagued across the country because we have a lot of ineffective math instruction going on because teachers aren’t engaging kids actively,” he said.
While consulting and leading professional development Brzezinski teaches educators that using ed tech in the classroom is easier than it seems.
In 2021, Brzezinski realized he missed being in the classroom and got a job teaching credit recovery in Wallingford. He then became a math coach at Clinton Avenue School until transferring to ESUMS to teach high school geometry and algebra to seventh and eighth graders.
Digitalizing traditional math worksheets does not engage students and is not an effective form of ed tech, he said on Monday. “You have to foster conceptual understanding.”
Brzezinski’s class worked on building surfaces of revolution using a 3D coordinate system, and then tested their models out with augmented reality.
Students used the geometry app, Geogebra, to plot their measured coordinate points and to then build a digital model whose size referenced the real-life object.
With applications like Geogebra, Math.new, Desmos, and Mathigon students can engineer their own math equations and use 3D and augmented reality to bring their lessons to life.
Live teacher view of student work.
Brzezinski conducts frequent “assessments” in class through the students’ understanding of the lessons with the ed tech tools.
“If the kids can build it, I know they know it,” he said.
He defined the difference between learning through traditional instruction and instruction incorporating ed tech as having procedural knowledge or conceptual understanding.
“If they can explain the why, the what is secondary,” he said.
He uses all kinds of hands-on instruction like paper folding in addition to ed tech.
The use of ed tech in the classroom has helped to get students wondering, discovering, self-assessing, and being creative, he said.
“I love to empower my students, but I also love to empower teachers who empower their students,” he said.
Brzezinski uses social media to be a catalyst of change to shift from “traditional instruction” of lecturing which can lack real life application, creativity, and student engagement, he said.
“I don’t believe there’s any concept that kids cannot discover without the right scaffolding from a teacher,” he said. “As a teacher I strive to create that scaffolding. I found more lately that ed tech helps me do just that.”
Maya McFadden File Photo
ESUMS Principal Medria Blue-Ellis.
During a separate interview Monday, ESUMS Principal Medria Blue-Ellis said Brzezinski’s work fits right in with the school’s education philosophy.
“Technology is a tool, so we’re using it as a tool to enhance learning and facilitate learning in some instances,” she said.
“Having a teacher who’s that invested in the profession [is] so important during this time of great resignation.”
She said she feels like she and the school “hit the jackpot” with Brzezinski’s transfer to ESUMS.
“It’s giving kids access to math in ways that they haven’t before,” she said.
She added that Brzezinski’s methods fall right in line with the school’s “future forward” theme this year that is focused on shifting educational instruction to be more innovative and engaging for students.
This week Brzezinski will attend a Vermont teaching conference to present about ed tech.
After class Brzezinski takes his lessons to social media platforms like Tik Tok to bring his classroom discoveries outside of ESUMS’s walls.
While students tested the accuracy of their surface model creations with augmented reality, Brzezinski occasionally captured a brief video or picture to later empower others online.
In a TikTok video made of Monday’s first period lesson, Brzezinski shows the creation of a student’s stacked surface of revolution and test its accuracy with two plastic cups. Watch that full TikTok below.
@tim_brzezinski Ss building their own surfaces of revolution in #geogebra #3d #calculator and testing and modifying their creations in #augmentedreality ! #geogebraclips #math #mathematics #maths #funwithmath #mathfun #mathtok
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