In one of the first lessons that Northwestern graduate student Meagan Morscher taught to a freshman honors biology class at Niles North High School, she incorporated her own research in astrophysics into a lesson plan on matter and elements.
In one of Morscher’s classes, she put up a slide with information about stars and matter on it.
“A couple of the kids came and said, ‘Oh! We’re going to talk about stars today?'” Morscher said.
Morscher, a fourth-year physics and astronomy graduate student, is one of seven NU graduate students granted the opportunity to teach at Chicago area schools as “resident scientists” in order to encourage student interest in math, science, technology and engineering.
The initiative, titled “Reach for the Stars: Computational Models for Teaching and Learning in Physics, Astronomy and Computer Science,” is part of the National Science Foundation’s Graduate STEM Fellows in K-12 Education program. It intends to improve the communication skills of graduate students through teaching.
The graduate students, known as GK-12 fellows, work in Chicago area classrooms one to two days per week, alongside full-time classroom teachers called teacher fellows.
Unlike the other graduate students in the program who are teaching courses within their areas of expertise, Morscher teaches a biology class even though her research is in astrophysics. She said she and her teacher fellow manage to find ways to incorporate her research into biology lesson plans, such as her first lesson on stars and matter.
“We’ve come up with a lot of good ideas where we think we’ll be able to tie … at least techniques and skills or astronomy-related things to a biology classroom,” Morscher said.
Second-year astrophysics graduate student Jason Hwang teaches a chemistry-physics sophomore class at Evanston Township High School. Hwang and his teacher fellow focus on teaching their students how to do simulations of a physics lab.
“They’ve actually been reacting very well; the kids are very motivated,” Hwang said. “I thought I would have a lot of trouble getting them to pay attention, getting them to care.”
Hwang’s teacher fellow, Daniel DuBrow, has been teaching sophomores for eight years. DuBrow said he thinks Hwang has been doing a great job teaching his students.
“(Hwang) has a great rapport with them, and I think they really respect him and see him as someone to look up to,” DuBrow said.
For some GK-12 fellows, effectively communicating subject matter to students can be a challenge. Daniel Sinkovits, a seventh-year grad student at NU, said he had a rough time planning how to teach his students to use Microsoft Excel.
“The lesson plan I came up with was not specific enough….(My teacher fellow and I) worked together and got through it, and it turned out okay by fourth period,” he said.
Sinkovits said he realizes he has a tendency to overestimate people’s abilities and feels his communication skills are improving while teaching chemistry to sophomores at Munchim College Prep, two blocks from Millennium Park.
The GK-12 fellows will teach their classes for one school year and can re-apply to the program if they wish. Morscher said she hopes she can apply what she learns from this program to her goal of becoming a professor but also hopes to simply interest students with her research.
“I really hope that they’ll get excited about (science), even if it’s not my area of science, but the idea of doing science and how exciting it can be,” Morscher said.
