It is not every day that a former student greets a teacher with, "Your course changed my life." The authors are the professor and student of the transformative course. Alicia Gonzales wanted to understand how to work with students to co-construct an environment where persistent problem solving in a technologically rich classroom was the norm rather than the exception. A year after she took the course, Gonzalez completed an independent study with Dr. Sandra Madden as an observer-researcher. Together, Gonzales and Madden set out to untangle the complex web of ideas, concepts, tools, and moves orchestrated during the class. Their intention in this article is to share a humble theory (Cobb et al. 2003) that emerged from the study, believing that the themes they identified will be broadly useful to others thinking about nurturing persistent problem solvers (PPS). While the site of their inquiry was a graduate-level teacher learning environment, they believe their findings apply to secondary classrooms as well, because all tasks and tools explored were either from secondary mathematics instructional resources or in line with grades 7-12 curriculum standards.