There’s something special that happens when two passionate biology teachers get together to talk about their craft. Zeena Ammar, Ph.D. and Molly Estrada, both educators at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, don’t just teach biology — they bring it to life in ways that stick with students long after the bell rings.
Their Teaching Journey
Molly’s journey to the classroom wasn’t a straight line. “I actually didn’t want to be a teacher at all, because my whole family is teachers,” she admits with a laugh. While exploring pre-med dreams in college, she discovered something unexpected: She really loved helping kids. What followed was a career built on one core principle she learned early on from a mentor — that knowing your students matters more than the content itself. “If you get to know your students, and there’s a level of respect and comfort and care, then you can get a lot more out of your students.”
Zeena’s path was equally winding. She started her career wanting to be a research professor at a top university, teaching “maybe a course every couple of years, whatever the minimum requirement is for teaching.” But as her Ph.D. program progressed, something shifted. Those massive lecture halls with 150-200 students? Not for her. “I really wanted an experience where I got to get to know my students, work with them, get them excited about science.” A neuroscientist by training, she brought her expertise in how the brain learns to the secondary classroom, where she could actually see the impact of her teaching.
Both teachers credit transformative mentors for shaping their teaching philosophy. Molly remembers working at a public school outside Boston with colleagues who understood that content was secondary to connection, especially under challenging circumstances. “It was very much, okay, this child’s going to court. Like, the content doesn’t matter right now. Reach out to them. Find out what’s going on with them, what’s going to get them to even want to come to class.”
For Zeena, it was a high school French teacher who had known her since kindergarten and would handwrite personal letters to students. “Every student needs somebody that even against all odds believes in them,” she reflects. That belief became her North Star. Last year, a struggling student who wouldn’t participate or turn in work wrote her a note at year’s end: “Thanks for believing in me when I didn’t believe in myself.” Now that same student comes by to brag about her 90 in math. “That is so exciting,” Zeena says, her pride evident.
When St. Andrew’s offered a Design and Innovation professional development pathway facilitated by Chuck James, the CTTL’s Design Thinking Research Lead, both teachers jumped at the chance. Zeena, whose entire undergraduate education at Georgia Institute of Technology was grounded in problem-based learning, knew the power of having students define problems and design solutions. But there was one catch: “I didn’t know, or don’t know, quite how to plan a class or plan one of those projects and implement it.”
Molly came from a different background but shared the vision. “We wanted to make it more hands-on, less teacher-directed and more student-directed.” The pathway gave them not just the terminology but the scaffolding to bring real-world problems into their classroom. This year, they’re tackling rising sea levels in Florida, giving students data and letting them drive toward solutions. “The design innovation class is very much, okay, let’s figure out solutions to the problem,” Molly explains.
Their biggest takeaway? Learning to step back. “How to scaffold it for the students and get them to kind of think on their own about it,” Zeena notes. There is some hand-holding, yes, but also space for students to explore. As the year progresses, the goal is for learning to become genuinely student-driven.
Connecting the Science of Learning to Make Complex Content Click
Teaching cellular respiration and photosynthesis to ninth graders is no small feat. These are concepts dense with chemical reactions and complex processes. So how do Zeena and Molly make it work? They start by asking: “What do the kids actually need to know?”
“We don’t want to lower the bar,” Molly emphasizes. “We want to keep the bar where it should be for the kids, because we know that high expectations often breed kids that know that we have confidence in them.” That doesn’t mean overwhelming students with every chemical equation. Instead, they chunk the information, reduce cognitive load and focus on the main takeaways. “Here’s what goes in, here’s what goes out. Now let’s apply it to a real-life situation.”
Those real-life connections are everywhere in biology. When teaching proteins, a conversation about keratin treatments and collagen supplements suddenly has students locked in. “Now she’s locked into the macromolecules because it’s messing with her beauty routine,” Zeena laughs. That’s the goal — make it personal, make it matter.
One research-backed strategy both teachers have embraced is retrieval practice. “You teach them something once it doesn’t mean students have learned it. Not at all,” Molly states plainly. “They’ve heard the words, they were really, really just processing it, even when they were taking notes. They were literally just mimicking what you’re doing.”
So what does retrieval look like in their classrooms? Sometimes it’s warm-up questions pulling from previous lessons. Other times, they’ll use a blank diagram students filled out the day before and have them work with a partner to recall what they remember. After homework reading assignments, students share their learning in small groups through jigsaw activities. “You have to go back over it, but in a different way,” Molly explains. “Don’t ask the exact same question, but try to apply it to a lab bench, or have them do a little think-pair-share.”
The Sheep Brain Dissection That Stole the Show
If there’s one moment that captures what makes Zeena and Molly special as educators, it’s their sheep brain dissection at The Science of Teaching and Leadership Academy. Standing in front of hundreds of teachers with “Britney Spears-style” headset microphones (that didn’t fit properly), they guided educators through a hands-on sheep’s brain anatomy lesson.
“It was cool how engaged they were,” Zeena recalls with a grin. “At one point, when I had them all close their eyes, I was like, oh, I could ask them to do anything right now. I felt like I had a lot of power.” The experience brought out the teachers’ inner curiosity — “seeing people kind of tap into their little kid selves a little bit was really cool.”
Of course, there were challenges. “They would cut out some random chunk and be like, so what’s this? I’m like, where did this come from? I don’t … I don’t know,” Zeena laughs. And the morning prep? “We were freaking out,” Molly remembers.
But here’s what made it memorable—the emotional component. “We really deeply encode memories when there’s some sort of emotional aspect to it,” Zeena explains. Whether it was awe, excitement or even the formaldehyde smell that participants will never forget, that dissection created lasting learning. And just like any learning brain, “If we can get kids emotionally invested in the material, then that’s something that’s going to stick with them forever.”
Reading the Room & The Emotional Side of Learning
Teaching isn’t just about delivering content — it’s about understanding what students are ready to receive. Both Molly and Zeena have become experts at reading their classroom’s emotional temperature.
“That emotional part of the brain, that’s what you have to tap into,” Molly explains. “If they’re super stressed or super anxious, they’re not hearing anything you’re saying.” So they’ve learned to adjust on the fly. Sometimes it’s taking a collective breath. Other times it’s completely reshaping a lesson mid-class. “OK, you guys are not handling this right now, there’s something going on,” Molly will say, then ask directly: “What’s going on, guys?”
Recently, they made a major shift in how they deliver notes after recognizing their students needed more support. “We were doing more, here’s some slides, let’s take some notes,” Molly explains. Now they display guided notes on the board — a change that’s lifted a lot of the cognitive load and transformed student engagement. Zeena had a student participate for the first time in class because of this adjustment. “There was less of … what do I write, what do I write, what do I write? And now he knows, so he followed along, and he answered the question correctly, and I was like, it’s amazing.”
A Culture of Continuous Growth
Looking back over their teaching careers, both educators have learned hard-won lessons about how students actually learn. For Molly, it’s all about retrieval practice. “I’ve definitely learned that you have to, again, be very repetitive with kids to the point where they’re actually being like, we’ve already done this. I’m like, right, but you’re going be using this language in your everyday language. That’s what I want it to become.”
Zeena’s biggest growth area has been scaffolding. “I think the scaffolding piece is really important, and that’s something that I didn’t quite understand, or know how to do, and break things up for the kids.” Now they break up projects into several different parts with deadlines along the way, even dry-running activities with students first.
What makes St. Andrew’s special isn’t just the individual teachers — it’s the culture of professional development that supports them. In 2022, St. Andrew’s leadership introduced the Professional Growth Pathways program as a way support employees on their career journey.
“I think it’s the choose-your-own-path way of it,” Zeena explains. “Not everybody’s in the same place at their career, not everybody teaches the same subject, not everybody teaches the same grade level … and so the fact that we’re supported regardless of what it is that we want to do.”
Molly, who is balancing teaching with two young children at home, appreciates the flexibility. “It’s nice that St. Andrew’s is not trying to force that upon me to be like, hey, you should do XYZ. I mean, they’ll always make suggestions … but it’s always another thing of we’d love to have you, not a, you need to do this.”
The support extends beyond professional development budgets. When Molly needed to learn AP Biology, the school brought back retired teacher Phyllis Robinson to mentor her and paid for her to attend a weeklong AP Summer Institute. When Zeena took on the role of Upper School DEB coordinator, the school immediately asked: “What can we send you to this summer? How can we set up this role so that you can feel that you’re growing in your career the way that you want to?”
Perhaps most importantly, they have each other. Throughout the interview, their partnership shines through — finishing each other’s sentences, laughing at shared classroom mishaps, and checking in about how lessons went with different classes. “We also talk with other people as well,” Zeena notes, describing how they gauge whether challenges are specific to one class or affecting all freshmen, for example.
At its heart, Zeena and Molly’s approach comes down to something simple: See students as whole people, meet them where they are emotionally and academically, and create experiences that matter. Whether it’s connecting macromolecules to beauty routines, letting students tackle real climate problems or simply knowing when to take a collective breath, they’re constantly adjusting to help students learn.
“Every student needs somebody that, against all odds, believes in them,” Zeena reminds us. In their classrooms at St. Andrew’s, every student has two.
Interested in bringing evidence-informed professional development to your school or district? The Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning offers workshops grounded in the science of learning, from brain-friendly teaching strategies to design thinking implementation. Contact us to learn how we can support your educators in creating classrooms where learning sticks.
