Some Of Newtown’s Creative Educators Share Teaching Strategies

By Emily Ashbolt

Many people, when asked to point out someone who has had a profound influence on their lives, would indicate their teachers. From preschool to graduation, teachers are constantly near. They have the duty to nurture people from almost infancy to near adulthood, and the impact that this can have can be far reaching.

It seems everyone has favorite teacher. Maybe it was the teacher who inspired you to become a physicist or a dentist, or the one who always had the best stories. For many, the teacher that really sticks is the teacher who made learning fun, made every day an in-class adventure.

As named by their peers, there are many teachers who fit this description in Newtown; teachers whom students, parents, and coworkers alike adore.

“I work with a wonderful, dedicated fourth grade teacher named Pat Kurz,” said Rosemarie Costello, a fellow fourth grade teacher at Head O’ Meadow Elementary School. “Although she has an administrative degree, she chooses to remain in the classroom and working with students. She has so many creative ideas and out-of-the-box projects.”

These projects always “span a large range of ability levels and learning styles, therefore providing interest and motivation for all students.”

Such a gem does not keep her secrets squirreled away, however, Ms Costello said.

“She’s always willing to share her ideas with other teachers, too. After many years in the classroom, her enthusiasm for teaching remains high,” her fellow fourth grade teacher said.

Sara Strait is one of Reed Intermediate School’s sixth grade teachers. To make learning fun for her students, Ms Strait likes to be sure that she focuses not just on learning facts for specific lessons, but also picking up skills that can be applied to all aspects of life.

One way she does this is by utilizing new technology, such as the online interactive poster site Glogster.edu and video creation program Photostory3.

“From a visual arts perspective, students are able to create a product with artistic visual impact regardless of their own artistic abilities,” explained Ms Strait. “We are using Photostory3 to create videos of their mysteries in which students have completed the writing process, story boarded pictures, and text using PowerPoint, and then imported pictures and audio of their mystery. The end result is a video of the mystery for publication rather than your traditional written document.”

These videos are then put on CDs and brought home to be shared with the students’ families. In addition to being fun and interesting, explains Ms Strait, “these technologies help develop their 21st Century skills for the future.”

As well as keeping her students up-to-date in the modern world, Ms Strait and cluster partner Barbara Mancher make sure that their students have other skills, such as manners and responsibility, they will need to progress competently as they grow.

“Students enjoy all the positive behavior supports that we have in place,” Ms Strait said. “Students are given ‘checkbooks’ where they can earn money for the grades that they earn on tests and quizzes and for caring behavior that we see throughout the day.”

This “money” can be used to purchase items or privileges such as pencils or not having to do a homeroom job. At the end of the year a big auction is held where students can bid on prizes with their remaining “cash.”

“It allows them to practice their math skills and to be responsible, because if they lose their checkbook, they lose their money,” said Ms Strait.

Other events and projects that Ms Strait employs include debating current events, having “reading raffles,” playing Jeopardy to review for tests, geography bees, and more. These various activities guarantee that every day is a new adventure.

Ms Strait does not feel that she is alone in her creativity.

“I do have to say that every teacher here at Reed is unique and creative in their own teaching style,” she said. “They all have wonderful ideas and make school a fun place to be.”

The Innovative Way

Like at Reed, at Newtown Middle School, innovation is a way of life.

“We are all so creative here,” claimed seventh grade social studies teacher Tom Debenedetto. “It’s the kids’ ages, I think. They are old enough to understand the jokes we make and to follow complicated and more interesting projects, but not too old as to have to be totally work orientated without any fun.”

Mr Debenedetto could easily win teacher of the year in the eyes of his students — in fact, he is consistently voted to that position. He attributes his popularity to being “the biggest kid in the room.”

“My wife gave me this quote when I first started teaching, and it’s really the way that I try to approach my job every day, because it really sums up the way I feel about it,” he said.

The quote he referred to was by H.L. Mencken and reads: “The best teacher, until one comes to adult pupils, is not the one who knows most, but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and the wonderful which slips into the infantile comprehension... the best teacher of children, in brief, is one who is essentially childlike.”

“Mr D,” or sometimes just “D,” tries to utilize this quote in his educating by just being extremely interested in his students’ lives.

“You have to trick them into learning,” he joked. “I’m like a magician. If the kids see that you are having fun, they’ll respond to that. We sing, I play music, they tell me about their crushes, it’s a good time.”

“What is more important to me,” Mr Debenedetto added, “is that that the kids have fun, and learn to be respectful, honest, good people.” These basic principles, he explains, can make any time of learning enjoyable and memorable.

“I can’t live without the students,” Mr Debenedetto said. “They sustain me.”

However, Mr Debenedetto is not the only treasured teacher stalking the halls. Along with Tech Ed wiz Donald Ramsey and science teacher Judy Catanese, the Middle School harbors pearls such as Andrew San Angelo and Abigail Olsen.

“Mr San was easily the best teacher I had at Newtown Middle School,” reflects now Newtown High School junior Liv Rowley on the seventh grade history teacher. “The first day of school, Mr San told us, ‘Everything revolves around me.’ As the year progressed, however, it became evident that, to this man, the world revolves around his students.”

Mr San Angelo said that his teaching philosophy stems from an idea: “History is thinking.”

He applies this idea throughout the year with projects such as The Oregon Trail online game, character journals, and other ideas meant to help the students “see history form the point of view of one of the participants.”

“I give a lot of perspectives,” said Mr San Angelo. “I want them to think for themselves. This class is about showing that history has more than one side.

“If I ask for an opinion from one of my students,” continued Mr San Angelo, “I want it. But more than that, I want them to support it. I don’t want them to be bored. They have to want to be engaged.”

Liv Rowley continued her praise of Mr San Angelo with words that all teachers long to hear:

“Mr San was able to take the subject most students find pointless and boring and make it genuinely fun. He taught his history, but he also allowed the class to flow as it pleased at times. He’s just thoughtful like that. What I loved most about him was his good-naturedness, and just how much he cared about his students,” she said.

Caring For Students

Abigail Olsen also cites caring for her students to be high priority.

“You need to find a hook for them, something to draw them in,” said Ms Olsen.

As an eighth grade language arts teacher, Ms Olsen believes the organic form of her class is one of the things that make it so appealing.

“We do all sorts of creative things,” Ms Olsen said. “We use visual cards, magazine cards, as inspiration for writing stories. We’ve done projects where the students had to write poetry and then draw pictures to go along with it. We do fun group sessions.

“This is not a lecturing class,” she continued. “It’s very…abstract. There’s a lot of student participation.”

The high school also features an abundance of quirky and inventive teachers. At the high school level, a teacher’s talents are localized to specific subject matter. The age and ability of high school students also features highly in the freedom of the teachers to be much more liberal and inventive with teaching styles.

If English teacher Lee Keylock is not organizing Victorian Balls or chemistry teacher Chris Carley is not exploding things (on purpose), there are teachers such as Trent Harrison who are striving every day to bring the sort of novel ideas into their rooms to inspire their students to be their best.

Mr Harrison teaches earth science, oceanography, and astronomy at the high school. This means he comes into contact with a lot of different students from a lot of different levels every day.

“You have kids who learn through many different styles in one room,” he explained, “so you have to be able to walk the fine line of keeping everyone involved.”

Not that it seems Mr Harrison has any issues with this. “I am very high energy,” he said. “And when you are high energy, the kids will feed off of that.”

Some of the ways that Mr Harrison keeps his classes coming back for more are with his unique and specialized projects.

“My oceanography class dissected crabs, and then the culinary room cooked the crabs,” he told of a recent exploit. “It was great, an experience these kids are rarely going to get a chance to encounter again.”

His oceanography class also dissected clams, an experience that Mr Harrison said made a few of his students say they “were never going to eat another clam again.”

In astronomy, Mr Harrison finds his hook for his students in activities such as buying telescopes the students must first construct. “It really has so many different levels of involvement,” he explained. “That is what makes it so interesting.”

A Passion For The Subject

Another science teacher, Susan McConnell, also works hard to make sure that her biology classes are kept interesting and relevant.

“I think the most important factor in making class fun and exciting is to really have a passion for the subject,” she said. “If I am truly fascinated with what I teach and really think it is cool and interesting, it will come through in class.”

However, Mrs McConnell said that sometimes units such as cell mitosis can seem to have little connection to their own lives, and tries to combat this.

“If they can’t relate to what is being taught, they can’t have fun with the material. Creativity with technology also helps keep students engaged. We now use flip video cameras to teach laboratory safety.”

These videos are viewed by other class members and then students text to vote for their favorites. “It is a fun creative way to learn, much better than listening to me babble,” Mrs McConnell explained. “Students are taking an active role in their learning.”

One of Mrs McConnell’s favorite projects is one “in which students have to morph a bacterium into a team mascot and come up with a fight song. The illustration, its nuances, and fight song have to depict accurate characteristics of the bacteria and its role in nature.”

Mrs McConnell consistently finds these particular projects “funny and witty.”

“It takes great understanding of the subject to portray it in a way that will make the science teacher laugh,” she elaborates. “The best part is it is something they created, not information they just move from one place to another.”

(Nominate a Newtown teacher with a teaching strategy worth highlighting by e-mailing Eliza@thebee.com. )