Student: These hats are so annoying.

Teacher: Put some wood in there now and I think we’re ready to go. Can you tell me what you see on that frame?

Student: I think I see nectar right there. I can’t see very well.

Student: Ooh, there’s honey, there’s honey.

Teacher: Because of science literacy, our students are active learners who ask questions. They have a sense of curiosity. They’re able to take that curiosity and go do something with it.

Student: Is that larva?

Student: Those are definitely larva.

Mark: At Birmingham Covington, we pride ourselves on interdisciplinary learning.

Student: These are responsible for fruits and vegetables.

Mark: Teachers wanted to collaborate to blend expertise in content, so we developed the science literacy to give teachers time to collaborate with each other and with kids, to identify a problem and go out and figure out how to solve it.

Tammy: Let’s talk about the plan for the day.

The students found an article that talked about honey bees possibly going into extinction, and they said, “We should do something with this.”

So Mrs. Roberts, she is going to work with all of the research teams. I’m going to come work with the presentation teams.

Pauline: Two teachers spend the afternoon with fifty-four students, totally blending their curriculum.

Tammy: So we’ll have our honey, and–

So my expertise would be the science area and my teaching partner, she is in language arts.

Pauline: You guys are the research team. What’s our responsibilities as a researcher? Yes.

Student: You need to like, figure out if it’s a reliable source or not.

Pauline: The research team provides the knowledge and the content for the other groups to take action upon.

Each group of you has got a different article that you’re going to read.

Max: Our article explained North Carolina being sprayed for mosquitoes with the Zika virus, but it killed off two million different honey bees.

Pauline: The first thing that we wanted them to do was pull out what they believed to be the key facts.

Student: The pesticide hasn’t been used for a while, so that’s pretty important.

Pauline: Then to think about who’s the author, what’s the source, what are the credentials?

Student: The first paragraph isn’t really that important.

Pauline: We want students to be educated consumers of information.

Tammy: You guys want to label it spring, fall, summer, winter.

On the other side of the room, we had our action teams working.

We want them to learn while they’re having fun.

They’re trying to figure out a fun way to get people involved and bring awareness out to the public. Every student is on both a research team and on an action team.

Max: It helps to spread out the workload, so that we can get more things done, and inform the public easier.

Student: We really do not want the world to look like this.

Tammy: We want them all to be a part of, what could you do? And they have so many ideas. We have a product team working on candle making and honey. And our garden team is making what we call seed balls. They combine compost and clay and seeds that are bee friendly. Just by planting flowers in your yard, you’re helping the bees.

Max: We also have a website that people can check out to inform themselves about the honey bees.

Tammy: The whole purpose is to educate, so they also have a brochure.

Gray: We want you and Ethan to be working on new information that we could be put on to our poster board.

Gray: We’re researching and then putting it to use in presentations and posters, so we can present it locally.

Student: Because if bees did go extinct, you’d be a little hungry.

Tammy: They know that to be credible, that they have to be as knowledgeable as they can. The kids said, “We have to have hives.”

Teacher: Okay, let’s go have some fun.

Students: Yeah.

Tammy: We need to actually have our own bees so that we’re helping.

Maggie: We are trying to repopulate the bees in Michigan, because they are dying.

Teacher: Shall we take a peek?

Maggie: Yeah, let’s do it.

Teacher: Okay.

Student: Okay, someone grab it.

Maggie: We also want to learn more about the bees. It helps me, because I can see it and I believe it.

Student: I got some brood.

Tammy: The nice part about our science literacy class is that the students get to do anything they want. In science, I am bound by the state objectives I have to teach.

I actually see larva.

Science literacy, there’s no state mandated curriculum. We didn’t have to choose a topic that was fifth or sixth grade curriculum related. That’s more powerful, because the students got to make those choices.

Student: We have some larvae and eggs.

Tammy: Our objective is that students would be able to take the skills that they’ve learned in our class and apply it to any problem.

Pauline: Science literacy is teaching our students to be curious about the world around them. With the problems they identify, they articulate how they want the community to help. So even as students, they are learning how to become effective agents of change. So it’s bigger than just the science content. It’s about helping to develop the citizens that we really hope our children become.

Student: Whoa, this one’s heavy. We got a lot.

Schools That Work

Birmingham Covington School