Two neon signs glow at the front of Chrissy McKinney’s middle school math classroom. One reads “We can do hard things.” The other reads “Math is tough, but so are you.”
Anchor charts line every wall, and whiteboards stretch across the back of the room. “They can’t walk in here without seeing something about mindset or math,” McKinney says.
And when McKinney writes MATHia® on the board, her students get excited. “They’re like, ‘Yes, it’s MATHia!’”
In her 26th year of teaching, McKinney has helped one class at Sangre de Cristo School District reach the highest share of students meeting grade-level expectations in its testing history. She credits our rigorous math curriculum, purposeful technology, and something she calls “teacher magic.”
Sangre de Cristo, in Mosca, Colorado, serves pre-K through 12th grade under one roof. Between 20 and 30 teachers cover every grade, and McKinney is the only middle school math teacher. She plans and teaches Course 1, Course 2, and Course 3 for sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. This year, she also teaches Algebra I to a group of advanced eighth graders and leads small-group interventions. “My planning days are not light or easy,” she says.
Her background helps her see the full picture. Before returning to the classroom, McKinney spent six years at a university preparing future teachers. She also helped plan and teach in another district’s first virtual school, and she holds a master’s degree in interdisciplinary leadership and technology.
That experience shapes how she plans. “I’m constantly asking, what’s the high-level view? Where are we? Where are we going?” she says. As the only math teacher for sixth through eighth grade, she makes sure students hear the same math language year after year.
“Kids are adaptable,” she says. “But if we can reduce cognitive load by having a similar frame of reference, I think that really helps.” She finds that our Middle School Math Solution uses consistent language across grades and aligns well with the Colorado Measures of Academic Success (CMAS), the state assessment.
The curriculum asks students to read closely, and McKinney sees that as a strength. “If you struggle to read, you’re going to struggle to know what the problem is wanting,” she says. The vocabulary, she adds, “is rigorous and challenging, yet it is introduced consistently and reinforced over time.”
She has also seen what happens without context. “If I were to give worksheet after worksheet of the same skill, there’s no context,” she says. “Even if they can do it, they don’t know when to pull that tool out.”
Real-world problems give students that context. When a lesson features a coach studying player statistics, her sports fans picture themselves asking for more playing time. When a lesson involves tagging sharks, she knows her students in landlocked Colorado need more background, so she shows a short video about shark tagging before the lesson begins. “That way they have the conceptual understanding of the activity we’re applying this math to,” she says.
She designs hands-on projects of her own, too. In one, students pick a scale factor and build their own scaled-up or scaled-down model. “It’s something in their hands every day, and they remember it,” she says. “They talk about it.”
McKinney calls MATHia, our adaptive math practice, “the highlight of the program.” What stands out most is how it meets each student where they are.
MATHia can recognize when a student with an IEP needs ones, twos, fives, and tens to work with. Meanwhile, a classmate works on the same concept using fractions and decimals. "The program helping me accommodate for that is just world changing,” she says.
McKinney sees the change in how students approach math. “The confidence it builds in students who typically would never even finish a lesson has been a major, major shift in their mindset about what they’re capable of,” she says.
She also teaches students to use MATHia thoughtfully. From the first day, she explains the embedded hints. “If you let [MATHia] give you the third hint, you really didn’t know the answer, and the program knows that,” she tells them. “Those circles are never going to fill up. So take your time. Think about it.”
Her classes use MATHia about one day a week, alongside workbook lessons, hands-on activities, and games. Students open it through a locked app on their Chromebooks, so they stay focused on the work. She also uses TI-34 MultiView calculators so students can check their inputs and catch their own mistakes.
For McKinney, the point is purpose. As she put it in a recent conference presentation, “The change was not more technology. It was a different purpose for technology.”
Class runs 57 minutes, and McKinney uses all of them. Students grab their materials and start right away, and an alarm signals when it’s time to pack up. “You give me attention and work every single minute that we’re together,” she tells them.
That focus means she rarely assigns homework, which has improved her relationships with families. Parents often didn’t know how to help with assignments at home. Now she guides the learning in class, and families see the results. Her newsletters, built on our family communication resources, show parents where the class has been, where it’s going, and how they can help.
From the first week, students know exactly what they’re working toward. McKinney turns the state standards into student-friendly “I can” statements, adapting the reflections at the end of each topic in the curriculum. “I can tell what a diameter and a radius are. I can calculate the circumference of a circle.” After each topic, students check off what they’ve mastered.
“My job is to pay you in knowledge,” she tells them. “To give you something that you own.”
The room is rarely quiet. Students talk through problems in pairs, show their thinking on individual whiteboards, and learn that a wrong answer is part of the process. In her words, the curriculum has helped create “a classroom culture where students are willing to take risks, engage in meaningful mathematical discussions, and develop confidence in their ability to solve challenging problems.”
McKinney joined Sangre de Cristo in 2024, the year the school piloted the Middle School Math Solution. To measure the impact, she followed one group, the Class of 2030, through two years in her classroom.
In sixth grade, the year before she arrived, 7% of the class met or exceeded expectations on the CMAS math test. After her first year, that share rose to 17.6%. By spring of eighth grade, 43.8% met or exceeded expectations. That’s more than six times their sixth-grade rate and the highest rate in the class’s testing history.
The class’s average scale score climbed 17 points over the same two years. In seventh grade, students scored one point below the state average. In eighth grade, they finished nine points above it.
The growth reached every middle school grade. On NWEA assessments from fall 2025 to spring 2026, sixth graders reached 107% of their projected growth, and 95% of them showed positive growth. Seventh graders reached 116%. Eighth graders reached 108% and finished with a class median at the 62nd percentile.
McKinney is careful about how she describes these gains. Her own chart labels them “classroom evidence, not a causal claim.” She also knows no curriculum succeeds on its own. “If you hand it to a teacher who is ill-equipped or not bought in, the curriculum will fall flat no matter what,” she says.
Still, the results felt affirming. “I was like, okay, let’s keep going,” she says. “I’m doing something right. We’re doing something right.”
The Class of 2030 is in high school now, and their confidence went with them. Earlier this year, the high school math teacher told McKinney her former students were doing very well with equation work. That same day at lunch, one ninth grader came to find her. “Ms. McKinney, you’re not going to believe this,” the student said. “We were working on this today, and I felt so confident.”
When asked for her secret, McKinney points to something she shared with the future teachers she trained. “There is a certain thing called teacher magic,” she says. “You develop that. You learn what that is. You understand the moves.” That magic looks different for every teacher, she adds, and it depends on adaptability. Early in her career, a mentor with nearly 40 years in education gave her the best advice she’s ever received. “How you handle change will determine how long you’re in education,” she says. “It won’t look the same every day, and that’s exciting to me.”
She also credits the support around her, including her administration for choosing the math curriculum and the people who build it. “If we didn’t have people doing the work Carnegie Learning does for curriculums and the research, we wouldn’t have anything to work with,” she says. “We’d be on our own.”
Now in her third year with our Middle School Math Solution, McKinney expects her strongest results are still ahead. And when her students look up at the neon signs at the front of the room, they have the proof.
They can do hard things.
See how our Middle School Math Solution helps students build deep understanding and the confidence to tackle hard problems