Science Super Star: Julie Brod
April 7, 2020
We are honored to name Julie Brod, Science Specialist at Thousand Oaks Elementary in Berkeley, as a 2020 Science Super Star!
Julie teaches 300 students between the 2nd and 6th grade. She has been working with all of them to create Science Fair projects that hold meaning and are full of discovery.
“Some struggling students have really brightened through the Science Fair. Getting to learn deeply about something they are passionate about, and in which they have ownership, encourages them to push past any negative self-talk about their own abilities or barriers they may have from their skill level in math or literacy.”
For the science fair, Julie encouraged students to choose a topic they are already passionate about. Their experiment can explore a sport, hobby, interest, or anything from their daily lives that they want to know more about. She knows that building curiosity about the “real world” is an effective way of captivating a student’s interest and engagement. She also stresses the importance of having them note their thought processes, and how they notice it develop throughout the process.
While designing their own experiments, especially while attempting to design ‘fair tests,’ students are engaging in an incredible amount of critical thinking: What variables could affect their results? In what way? How can they be controlled? How should data be collected and recorded? etc.
Julie is a huge advocate of interconnecting subjects to create lessons that build strengths in multiple subjects. She has students use interactive notebooks to record thoughts, work and reflect on past learnings. Science is also an excellent way to put theoretical math concepts into practice. Utilizing math to measure, record, take averages, and graph results is often less intimidating when paired with an exciting science experiment.
She strives to ensure her lessons are applicable to her classrooms’ worlds. She introduces concepts of environmental science, and makes it relevant to daily life. Students also discuss relevant social experiments, and compare their ‘fair test’ experiments to what is shown in the news. Julie led her students in a discussion on how media can mold the world into a scary place, but through their own science experiment, and on the science experiments of many others, most people are good and honest.