2020 PAEMST Spotlight: Allison Greenberg
Allison Greenberg is a K-5 STEM Specialist at Woodside Elementary in Everett Public Schools
This week we’re spotlighting Washington’s Presidential Award for Excellence in Math and Science Teaching (PAEMST) finalists, who will go on to be considered for the national award. Check out the rest of our PAEMST Spotlight interview series here.
As an elementary teacher, how do you integrate science into other subjects?
Since making sense of real-world science in our everyday lives requires the application of math skills, reading, writing and communication, I integrate those same skills into my STEM lessons. Students practice gathering and analyzing their measurement data from science investigations and engineering design challenges to make written and/or verbal claims about their findings. Additionally, I anchor engineering design challenges in science content to help students make sense of the physical, life, or earth and space science concepts that connect to the problems posed and their solutions.
What has surprised you about teaching during a pandemic?
In March when the pandemic hit, our district transitioned in record time to remote learning, providing access to chromebooks for all students. I quickly switched to teaching a combination of live Zoom and Asynchronous STEM lessons to K-5 students, knowing that students would need continued social connections as well as flexibility to complete their work at times convenient for families. I found that the combination of live and remote instruction allowed for more access to both students and parents outside of normal school hours and I was surprised that my connections to my K-5 students and their families grew stronger as a result. Through using online learning management platforms, such as Canvas and Google Classroom, and engaging students in educational sites (Discovery Education, PhET and FlipGrid), I extended our STEM lessons and provided students the opportunity to submit videos to share their thinking, learning and creative inventions. I used these tech tools to respond to students and families, providing feedback and support to students on their videos and asynchronous work.
Is there a distance learning lesson that you are particularly proud of?
One remote STEM lesson I am very proud of was an engineering design challenge I created and engaged K-5 students in last Spring, encouraging creativity to solve the problem of communicating a message to family members in a different room without yelling or using phones. They were challenged to engineer a solution using patterns in light and/or sound to send their message. Students’ solutions were so creative! I could tell they really had fun with the challenge. One kindergartner used a remote control car to send a recorded message on a toy microphone to his sister, a 1st grader used flashlights and mirrors to send morse code messages to his dad, and a 3rd grader sent coded flashlight signals to family indicating that her sticky note messages would be arriving soon via a zip line. Students shared their creative engineering designs in videos and included their family in the process, making STEM a shared family experience.
What will you do differently in your classroom when we return to “normal?”
I have seen the power and benefit of giving students more opportunities to share their thinking, creativity and learning outside of the typical classroom day through the use of technology, allowing for flexibility for families and encouraging the idea that we are constantly learning even after the school-day ends. When we return to “normal”, I definitely plan to engage students more in using technology at school and at home to share their thinking in Google docs, slides and in videos, which also gives me a chance to provide pointed feedback to help move student thinking forward and strengthens positive connections with students and families.
What advice would you give to parents or caregivers who want to incorporate more science into their elementary students’ lives?
I would encourage parents or caregivers to help their students see that science is happening all around us, even in small everyday moments, and science helps us makes sense of our world. Students are naturally curious and creative problem-solvers, and we can encourage this innate curiosity and creativity by asking students open-ended questions about the science phenomena they see happening at home or their engineering solutions. Great questions to spark wonder, deeper thought, investigation, problem-solving and growth-mindset include: “What do you notice? Why do you think that is happening? What do you think might happen if . . .? Why did you choose those materials for your design? How would you improve your design to make it work better?”
What experiences do you think best prepared you for the past year?
While this pandemic year has definitely added a new challenge to teaching, I feel I was best prepared to tackle the challenge through my deep understanding of elementary content, standards and best strategies for engaging students in inquiry science and engineering. Additionally, our district did a wonderful job of providing all teachers with technology training as part of our district’s 1:1 technology plan. This training on how to use the technology to actively engage students in rigorous learning made the quick transition to remote learning successful.
Who have you been following or reading from a science perspective in the past year? Any other publications, blogs, etc. that you would recommend?
To support my STEM lesson planning, I consistently reference the NGSS standards website, the University of Washington’s STEM Teaching Tools, and Page Keeley’s texts for formative assessment probe ideas.
With my aim to incorporate more mathematics into my STEM lessons to support students with making sense of data and graphical representations, I took a course last summer on Data Science from Stanford University’s YouCubed program, designed and taught by Jo Boaler. The new course shared wonderful ideas to help students makes sense of and use data to answer questions and solve real-world problems.
The Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching (PAEMST) is the highest recognition that a kindergarten through 12th grade science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and/or computer science teacher may receive for outstanding teaching in the United States. Awardees will be announced this spring.
