Holding a grade-schooler’s attention in the classroom is a formidable task, but one teacher at Toledo’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Academy for Boys got help from NASA to keep his students engaged.
“It's been my goal for a while now to stop teaching out of the book,” Luke McKinley, the Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics specialist for MLK academy, said about his approach to teaching kids.
“I teach pre-K all the way to sixth grade, STEM, hands on science,” he said. “The kids come to me twice a week, every student in the school comes to me twice a week, to do hands-on science.”
And Mr. McKinley’s experiments go far beyond the classic volcano or solar system models associated with science classrooms of the past.
“We have a tower garden; it's a hydroponic tower garden,” he said, resourcing students with the latest technologies, including 3D printers, rockets, and robotics. A signature experiment Mr. McKinley uses to pique the interest of his students is one involving UV beads, which change color under different light sources.
“They're white in the classroom, but when you take them outside, they’re a multitude of colors,” he said.
“And they're like, ‘No, they're white. Like I'm looking at them and they're white.’
“And then you take them outside, and you see the ‘aha moment.’ And they're like, ‘Wait a second, maybe I should listen to this guy.’”
Students should listen to Mr. McKinley, a teacher with 24 years of experience, who averages two professional development opportunities a year, and this past June had the opportunity to participate in the annual LiftOff Summer Institute camp.
“All teachers participate in professional development,” said Willie Ward, the principal of MLK academy. “This particular one was a super special one, because not many people were selected to go to this.”
Indeed, only 55 teachers were chosen across the entire country to attend the June 24-28 institute put on in Houston by the University of Texas Center for Space Research, Texas Space Grant Consortium members and affiliates, and NASA.
“It was not only huge for our school, it was huge for our district,” Mr. Ward said highlighting the prestige of Mr. McKinley’s achievement.
“One, he loves very much what he does,” Mr. Ward said, and made it clear that the honor of attending the space week centered around growing plants in space with famous astronauts like Fred Haise, Jr., the high point for Mr. McKinley, was only possible because Mr. McKinley’s passion for teaching and learning.
“He [Mr. McKinley] talks about kids exploring and finding ways to discover new knowledge,” Mr. Ward said, and this was moment to show he practiced what he preached.
Besides talking to astronauts from the Apollo 13 mission, Mr. McKinley got to tour the Space Center in Houston, and see the Saturn Five Rocket.
But, “I think the biggest takeaway was networking with the rest of the teachers,” Mr. McKinley said, as each teacher shared lessons on, “things that are offered across the board for STEM.”
For a topical lesson Mr. McKinley was given tomato and pepper seeds grown on the international space station that kids will have a chance to gauge against Earth-grown seeds.
Mr. McKinley and his class will enter the experiment blind with some of the seeds labeled A and others labeled B, “so we're going to grow them and try to make our own hypotheses on which one was which.”
“It's not just a silly lesson that we're doing in the classroom,” Mr. McKinley said. “It's a lesson that, once we're done, we can share and utilize that data and get feedback back from NASA engineers, which hopefully will intrigue the students.”
Just a few months ago, Mr. McKinley’s third, fourth, fifth and sixth graders, collected data from the eclipse and presented it online for the NASA program.
“School wasn't in session that day,” he said, and shared that it’s difficult to get students to get their homework in.
“The next day all the kids that were excited to provide their data and share it, because they knew it was important,” Mr. McKinley said.
“And they all got certificates from NASA.”
Likewise the prestige he received from the NASA program he hopes will motivate students “to show that what we're doing in class is important, and that the students are capable of a lot more than what they think they are.”
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