|
See correction at the end of article.
Science teacher Susan Chea walks down the hall of Muscota New School, her arms full with wooden blocks and colorful paper. She’s headed to Victoria Dallas-Stephenson’s combined second- and third-grade classroom.
The classroom creeps with science. Snakes slither and turtles slowly tiptoe around their terrariums. One of the chicken-wire topped boxes is prickly with stick bugs hiding in plain sight. It’s hot in the room.
“Perfect for them,” Dallas-Stephenson says gesturing to the terrariums with a smile, before jamming open the door to lower the temperature in the room. “But miserable for us.”
Chea is at Muscota two days a week and co-teachers with Dallas-Stephenson on Tuesdays for a 40-minute period. She works for the Salvadori Center, a group that teaches hands-on science and math.
The center is a Department of Education vendor and is one example of STEM education. The acronym stands for Science Technology Engineering and Math.
“We take these abstract ideas and make them real,” said Dr. Leonisa Ardizzone, president of the Salvadori Center.
STEM education is en vogue right now, in part, Ardizzone says, because of changes from the top.
“The federal government is pushing to get more innovative programming in schools around the country,” she said. The state is embracing it, she says, and so is the city.
“In the last two months we’ve changed to STEM,” said Denise McNamara, the city’s Department of Education’s director of science. Her office used to be two silos, she says, one for science education, and one for math. The two never mixed.
“We’re trying to match the two,” she said, and develop hands-on curriculum.
One pilot program started in September is called “If I had a Hammer” and sets up a building in a large space. The children examine the building and then have to reconstruct it.
Another program is geared towards educating a “green workforce.”
To do that she and the DOE are reaching out to institutions to partner with, like Columbia University, to see how they can help to make green science practical and real for students.
More and more money is earmarked in budgets and raised independently for this kind of hands-on learning.
We’ve received STEM funding for doing after school training,” Ardizzone said.
Some of the money goes towards professional development for teachers to implement their own lessons.
“We let teachers play and explain this themselves,” Ardizzone said.
Salvadori also offers a summer institute, optional classroom visits and classes after school or on the weekend.
“We designed it that way because we knew teachers have different levels of interest,”
Ardizzone said.
Back at Muscota the children return from a bathroom break in lines of boys and girls, the students greet Chea, calling her simply “Susan.” Dallas-Stephenson, whom the students all call Victoria, asks them all to sit on the brightly colored rug just inside the door.
Susan begins by holding up a picture.
“Who knows the name of this bridge? Is it the George Washington Bridge?”
“Nooooo!” the students respond.
After a few guesses and quizzical looks from the kids, Susan answers.
“The name of this bridge is an arch bridge,” she says.
“What materials do you see?” Susan asks.
“Rocks!” “Boulders!” “Stone!” they reply, without raising their hands.
On a board on the floor Susan stacks blocks of wood until there is a miniature curved arch bridge. She explains the parts of the bridge, the all-important keystone, the voussoir (“That’s French,” one student exclaims) or sides of the bridge and the abutments – a word that never fails to make seven- and eight-year-olds giggle.
The lesson is about tension and compression – two terms the students have been learning about. The students are asked how the bridge can hold up a truck.
“There’s something invisible pushing it!” one student exclaims.
“It’s symmetry!” says another.
Victoria smiles. “Oh, what words we’re using!”
“It’s gravity” says another student.
“Now we’ve introduced another force – gravity,” Victoria says, trying to bring the conversation back on topic.
“We’re applying two different forces to hold the bridge up” tension and compression, Victoria says.
“Let me do an experiment, and I need a volunteer,” Susan said.
She picks three volunteers.
A boy in a brown shirt is the guinea pig standing directly behind the tiny wooden bridge. The two other students stand by his side. Susan tells him to put his foot on the keystone.
He slowly steps up onto the bridge.
Instead of holding his weight, it crumbles under his foot. Susan frowns.
Muscota Principal Tomas Grabski enters the room and steps into the lesson.
With the bridge in pieces, he and Susan move to the other side of the carpet and lean back to back. They inch their feet away from each other forming an arch with their bodies.
“The middle part is the most important part,” Grabski says, pointing over his shoulder.
Standing up straight, he continues.
“If you were by yourself you would fall … It’s almost like we had imaginary glue on our backs,” he said.
The students return to their desks, which are grouped in fours, and begin cutting into Susan’s brightly colored paper. Once the forms are cut out and the sides folded, the children will have pieces of a paper bridge, just like the wooden one on the floor.
One of the first done, a student named Finley, reconstructs the wooden bridge, but puts his paper piece where a wooden one would go.
The bridge stays up.
The room becomes very busy, with some students still cutting, others folding, some experimenting with their pieces. They’re playing and they’re learning.
Three rebuild the wooden bridge and retry Susan’s failed experiment. This time it works.
“It’s fascinating to me to see how they grow,” Victoria says.
Science is her first love, she says, and she would be teaching about bridges anyway, but now they have the benefit of an engineer, Susan, to help.
“They see her as their teacher,” Victoria said.
This time of the day would be project time anyway, so the subject matter melds with a block of time the kids would use to develop those “fine motor skills” like cutting and folding.
Back in his office, Grabski said he was lucky to secure the funding for the Salvadori program this year. Last year the school couldn’t afford it.
“We have to be very resourceful,” he said.
The full price is $50,000 for a year-long school-wide program. Because Muscota has become an example, Salvadori uses it to demonstrate the program’s effectiveness, so Grabski only had to come up with $15,000.
He found the money through grants and managing his budget. But it’s worth it, he said.
“It’s a very nicely integrated teaching method,” he said. “These are seven-year-olds who use words like construction, pressure, collapse.”
The natural experimenting and troubleshooting is a great way to learn, he said, because students who have different ways of learning can approach the subject from almost any angle.
“It embraces the constructionist model of learning,” he said. “We do something, observe, reflect – it’s the whole process.”
Finley, the student who replaced the wooden block with the paper one, might have summed it up.
“I find it easier than doing science,” he said.
This article has been changed to correct the pricing of the Salvadori program at Muscota New School.
|
Tweet me!
