STEM Innovator Named Teacher Of Year

Stephanie White’s classroom is one of the least tidy at Quinnipiac STEM School, because she encourages students to learn with their hands and get messy in the process.

The district’s ​“teacher of the year” for 2016, White heads Quinnipiac’s ​“Discovery Room” to help K‑4 students get hands-on experience with science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), so they’re excited about the subjects early on in their educations and less likely to be disengaged later.

Board of Education members and district officials honored her and three finalists at Monday evening’s board meeting at Martinez School on James Street.

“I know the passion that she brings to education” with a ​“focus on equity for every student,” Superintendent Garth Harries said of White.

Earlier that day, White was helping one group of students make Play-doh and working with another to engineer water filters, as part of a teaching unit on India’s Ganges River. ​“They had to design a water filter that would be affordable for people to use there and clean the water,” White said.

Students learned that they could design a better filter using more materials and resources to ​“suck out the different contaminants,” but realized that would drastically increase the unit price and potentially decrease their profit margin. ​“It was an eye-opening experience for them,” White said.

Though STEM fields are trying hard to recruit women, White said her robotics program has drawn more girls than boys. When she first started the program last year, 15 kids signed up. This year, she has a long waiting list ​“of students who are dying to get in,” she said.

She integrates technology into her curriculum. White received a $56,000 grant from Discover Video in Wallingford for technology equipment, allowing her students to stream videos of their work and more easily access information.

“We’re teaching them the 21st century skills to get them where they need to be, because 75 percent of the jobs in 2018 are going to be STEM jobs,” White said. ​“They need to be able to communicate, not just texting. They have to be able to talk to people, work together in a group and just be able to get along.”

White started off teaching at private Hellenic American Academy in Lowell, Mass., a school focused on teaching Greek language and history to its students. After three years, in 2004, she headed to Columbus Family Academy in New Haven to teach in its dual language program — this time teaching English to students learning in Spanish every other week. She also spent four years as a fifth and sixth grade science teacher at Columbus, before starting at Quinnipiac last year.

She said she doesn’t see science as a separate discipline, but rather one that ​“connects with everything.” The district should do better at integrating both science and social studies into the curriculum to ​“really hone in on those real-world problems that we’re trying to solve,” she said.

White describes her teaching style as ​“loud. I’m loud to the point where I think I get more excited than they do sometimes, especially when they get something right and it works.” She encourages students to be comfortable with failure, because she views it as ​“the first attempt in learning.”

As a curriculum facilitator funded by the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) grant, she works with teachers in grades K‑4 to develop STEM units with real-world focuses in their curricula.

Students are having fun, but they’re also being challenged, White said.

Last week, she asked her kindergarten students to engineer a three-dimensional model of a letter of the alphabet — with the challenge that it had to stand on the table for a minimum of five seconds. She put out supplies, including construction paper, pipe cleaners, and straws, and kept quiet while they tried to figure it out.

“The one thing I said was, ​“You can’t tape it to the table,’” White said, laughing.

She will head to Hartford Tuesday evening to be honored by state Education Commissioner Dianna Wentzell and other state educators. Hillhouse High School English teacher Chevaunne Breland, Hyde School social studies teacher Gary Aurora and Adult Education math teacher Cara Mortillo were finalists for the Teacher of the Year distinction.