Thanksgiving: Be Safe. Relax. Recharge.

For those making plans for the Thanksgiving holiday, it will not be the same as many people eschew the normal travel associated with it and the large indoor meal with family, all due to the pandemic. The ISA team will take the same responsible precautions as many of you, with small and/or outdoor gatherings, Zoom calls with faraway family, and a belief in the greater good that might come from a changed holiday. So, a very happy Thanksgiving from the ISA team. Wear a mask. Keep it small. And think of others that you’re helping with your actions. We’ll get on the other side of this, if we all work together.

ISA’s Equity and Anti-Racist Work

This school year, ISA is engaging with several school and district partners on work that is focused on racial inequities, implicit bias, and anti-racism, to address the barriers that keep many historically underserved young people from reaching their full potential.

In all instances of our equity work, the conversations we’re having with our partner schools and districts are authentic, thoughtful, and passionate. We grow so much from our work with these equity-minded educators, and we’re glad that they grow with us also. For example, one participant in a recent training commented, “I appreciated having strong norms, a clear learning objective, diverse opportunities to engage and connect with my colleagues, and instructor expertise with both content and facilitation.” Another stated, “The content delivery was some of the most effective I have experienced, especially because of the sensitive topic. The presenter was compassionate to the attendees. I also appreciate the authenticity of the presenter combined with her knowledge.”

Click here to find out more about this side of ISA.

What We’ve Been Reading Recently

A few of the articles on our virtual desks this month:

• Checking Yourself for Bias in the Classroom, from Teaching Tolerance. Unconscious bias can shape the responses of even the most well-intentioned educators. But teachers can check themselves, as one teacher shares.
• Going Back to Virtual Learning: The Challenges of Reopening High Schools, from Edutopia. High schools face unique difficulties reopening.
• Election Uncertainty and Anxious Students: Inside 4 Social Studies Classrooms. On the morning after Election Day, Education Week reporters checked in with four social studies classes in four states to capture the conversations teachers and students were having.
• What Highly Effective School Leadership Really Looks Like in a Pandemic, from EdSurge. “Personal leadership—setting an example, in your own person, of how you want your community to be—is as important as ever.”
• 10 Resources to Boost Student Media Literacy, from ISTE. A list of organizations that offer tips, videos, curricula, and lesson plans to help educators guide students in navigating the media landscape.
• How to Improve Schooling During the COVID-19 Pandemic, According to Students, from the Hechinger Report. Students have identified common problems and shared similar ideas for what schools can do better.

Meet ISA Science Coach Deborah Smithey

First, what led you into education and specifically working in the realm of science?

It was my former teachers and school administrators who pointed me to teaching. I was the student who’d always visit my former high school teachers during breaks from college. When I graduated from college at the age of 19, I went back to my former high school to visit, and the school principal, my former physical education teacher, said to me, “Debbie, I know that you just graduated from college with a degree in biology, and we need a biology teacher for the upcoming school year.” Keep in mind that I never had any education courses as an undergraduate.

So I started teaching students who were older than I was, but it didn’t really matter. Because I grew up in the neighborhood and went to school with their older siblings, my students made the assumption that I was the same age as those older siblings. I knew my subject content, I followed the district’s curriculum guide, and I modeled my discipline practices on those of my favorite high school teacher and my mother: respectful, firm, and honest. I also made a lot of home visits since I lived in the neighborhood and did home visitations for the 39 years that I was in the classroom.

I got into science because other subjects did not hold my interest. I asked for a chemistry set when I was nine and would conduct my own experiments throughout the house. But that kind of intellectual freedom was encouraged in our home. My mother was a single parent and did not remarry until I was 32. Early on, she sat me and my sisters down and told us her plan: We were going to college, and she was not going to pay for it. For this to happen, she said, we had to maintain excellent grades. I’m so thankful that my mother had a plan and helped us enact it. I learned that if you study hard and get As, you can get a free education.

What do most schools get wrong about science teaching and learning?

Most schools get science teaching wrong because they don’t make it fun and focused on the students. Science is a subject that cries out for being student-centered. In the field of science, you learn by doing; in the field of science, you learn from your mistakes. This is what the scientific method is all about. If you try something and it doesn’t work, you raise questions, make modifications, conduct the experiment again, and review the new data. This is what is happening right now in the world, as scientists try to secure a vaccine for the COVID-19 virus by conducting many experiments and collecting data.

No doubt, in these last few months, you’ve seen some dynamite virtual teaching. What best practices have you seen in science classes that you want all science teachers undertaking?

I want teachers to feel free allowing their students to get involved in virtual labs, an excellent learning experience for the students. This generation loves to play electronic games; let’s use that love to our advantage. I also ask teachers to remind their students that they might not get the desired results at the start⸻but it’s important to figure out why that happened and determine next steps. What are factors that led to those initial results? What can students do to alter and improve them? How can students redesign an experiment to get new and potentially desired results?

Think back to your teaching days and a special bond you had with a student or a class. What made it special? For you and your students, what made the learning work?

I have many classes where special bonds were formed, and one thing that I found extremely important was that I would always get my students involved in some type of summer project. In fact, many of my students have been involved in research programs at colleges and medical schools in Philadelphia. Although my students wanted to get summer jobs, I was able to set up internships that paid them⸻far more than flipping burgers at a fast food restaurant⸻and that were situated in labs of Philly area colleges. These summer experiences have paid off; several of my former students are science teachers and physicians. My greatest joy, though, was when one of my students was named a Gates Millennium Scholar.