Grant provides $20K in training, equipment for JHS science department

Johnston High School chemistry teacher Stephen Pickin was visibly enthusiastic as he tinkered with the Lab Master in his classroom.

“It’s basically a complete chemistry lab in a box,” Pickin said. “This small thing, I think it looks like a Roomba. It has a heater. You can do spectral photometer, you can put a little tiny vial. Stuff that is really hard to do because you have to rig up all the racks and stuff, and plus it’s a lot of other equipment we don’t have.”

It was just one part of the STEM grant he and physics teacher Timothy Stahl were awarded by the East Bay Education Collaborative in October. The total package – including equipment, curriculum and training at an EBEC seminar – equaled out to around $20,000, with the funding coming to EBEC through the Office of Naval Research.

Pickin said the EBEC’s only requirement is the teachers reflect they are using the equipment they’ve received, and Pickin knows that won’t be a problem.

“They liked it. I started a lab Friday … yeah, they like it, any time they’re not listening to me,” he said with a laugh. “We’ve just barely scratched the surface, but they liked it, it was good.”

Pickin and Stahl – who two years ago received a similar grant for physics – attended training on Oct. 28-29 in Warren that featured “two days of talking about the pedagogy and how it’s implemented.”

“Basically we did labs for two solid days,” Pickin said. “There’s nothing like … the hands-on [experience] to see how these things work. It was invaluable. Just the ability if you had all the stuff and didn’t really have an experience of using it, there’s always a learning curve. So that was the format, two days. A lot of feedback. It was probably 20 people, not quite, statewide that got accepted to it.”

Pickin showed off one of the Lab Aids textbooks he was able to purchase through the grant, with each carrying a price tag of about $200. He said Lab Aids creates kits, such as the acid testing one in Pickin’s classroom, and the books are geared toward working with them.

He said the trainer featured at the EBEC event in late October conducted up to four labs a week with his students, which Pickin noted is the “best kind of learning.” While that sort of output may not be possible for Pickin, the Lab Aids materials make the classroom experience inherently more engaging.

“It’s set up so the labs are pretty straightforward. The bottom line is it enables to us to teach more chemistry, more opportunities for the kids to have hands-on activities when, let’s face it, that’s how you learn best,” Pickin said.

He said the textbooks feature one concept per page, rather than a spreading it across an entire chapter. They help bring Johnston High in line with next generation science standards, or NGSS, which Pickin said “are the big thing now in science.”

“It’s all about process, it’s all about doing stuff and that’s one of the reasons I’m really excited about it,” Pickin said. “It’s very hard to take, they’re very complicated and multi-layered and cross-cutting and there’s a lot to it, but I don’t want to say you’re cheating, but it enables you to get right to it and do all the right things.”

Pickin said times have changed since he started teaching in 1978. He said he doesn’t perform some experiments anymore because of safety issues, and resources can be difficult to come by because “there’s only so much money.”

He was thankful of the Navy’s and EBEC’s generosity, as they paid the substitutes and have “fostered” STEM learning in his classroom.

“It’s tough. It’s also, ‘What do I need?’ You look at a chemistry catalog, and it’s just like, ‘Oh, my god.’ I teach three levels – I teach an honors, a college and a lower level – and how do you reach everybody?” Pickin said. “You look for these things, and I think they pay for the substitutes. The point is the Navy doesn’t spend a lot of money, but they have a good rapport with this group in Warren. I think it has a lot to do with the Navy presence in Newport and everything.”