On the second floor of Mountain View Middle School one science classroom has chairs and tables for 32 students, a carpeted floor, a single sink and little space to walk around. Another classroom, slightly larger, has a linoleum floor, a few more students and two sinks.

The carpet in the first classroom deadens the noise of students moving about to conduct experiments on the counters that surround the room, but the fibers soak up liquid spilled during experiments. The classroom with the linoleum floor is easier to clean, but generates noise for its first-floor neighbors. In both, counter space on which experiments are performed is at a premium.

Newberg School District science educators are hoping to address science classroom issues with money from the $27 million bond passed in May.
Riff Canaday, a teacher on special assignment in the district office, has three decades of experience in science classrooms. He has been tasked by the district with producing a plan for STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) classrooms.

“It’s a different way of having kids learn things,” Canaday said, and it meets new standards enacted by the state for science education.
Canaday said the cornerstone of the curriculum involves teamwork among small groups of students, ideally in pairs, as they work to solve local or global science questions by designing and conducting experiments.

The challenges will not be met by changing curriculum, but by changing logistics. For years Canaday has had a science elective at MVMS where students built and tested things such as solid-fuel rockets, but he added that what is possible for a single elective will not be a good fit for every middle school science class.

“That’s the big bugaboo,” he said of storing the equipment and scores of projects at different stage of development. His plan would be to have each student pair work on a computer workstation with sufficient space and enough storage that they can save it for their next science class period.

“You have to have the classroom set up to make it easy for the teacher to use this equipment,” he said. Each pod would be furnished with the equipment necessary for the experience.

STEM requires students to tackle a problem, define its parameters, build a model solution, and then test it. Ideally, he said, the students would be able to analyze the failures of their prototype and come up with a better solution. In the case of pop bottle rockets, he said, students would be able to launch their rocket 10 or 20 times as they tweak their design.

Canaday has been visiting other schools in Oregon to report on what they’re doing to meet STEM requirements and even took time during a personal trip to Colorado to visit three middle schools with STEM programs.

During a Nov. 8 meeting of the district board of directors, he reported that he would recommend curriculum that is delivered by a teacher (some schools had the teacher facilitate computer-based learning) and with all the students working on a similar project (some schools had students work on different projects simultaneously) to maintain a good level of energy and excitement in the classroom.

For MVMS the plan would call for the possible addition of classroom space on the east side of the building with a series of STEM classrooms opening onto an atrium where tests could be performed.

Canaday said he hopes to bring an estimate of the cost to the school board in the near future.

Story by Laurent Bonczijk, the Newberg Graphic