Science in Prison Classrooms
Ok ya’ll…I’m sitting on my backporch looking at the beautiful fall leaves, surrounded by our three cats, our eight chickens (did I mention we have chickens?), my trusty Greyhound, and it’s 65 degrees at 7am on November 6. What is happening here in the Mid Atlantic? I don’t know, but I’m loving it! Tipping my coffee cup to Mother Nature for this beautiful day (not thinking about global warming). Let’s talk Science now…
When I was a principal at a maximum security prison for kids aged 10-21 (Yep. You read that correctly), we had the lowest success rate for all things academic. The kids and the teachers were also low; it seemed like everyone felt nothing would change. But it did, and pretty quickly, actually. I had never worked in a prison setting, and I came in and ran the campus just like I had run the public school campuses I had worked in. Our math, language arts, and social studies scores rose immediately, but science was a bit harder. In prison classrooms, very rarely are you allowed to do true labs, due to safety issues with equipment, chemicals, etc…so before we tackled that, we decided to at least hook our students on science.
My own children were fortunate to have one of the best AP Biology teachers on the planet at Randall High School in Amarillo, Texas. Her name is Sam Usnick. I mention her name here because super star teachers never get the attention they deserve. Ms. Usnick…you changed my artsy-fartsy kids’ opinion of science in one semester! Hats off to you (and much love to you as well). Anyway, both my kids, four years apart, raved about this unit they did in Ms. Usnick’s class where they studied the book The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. If you aren’t familiar, Preston writes about the emergence of Ebola, but he does it in a way that totally reads like a horror movie (I think they tried a movie, and maybe a series, but nothing compares to Preston’s writing style). I thought of that when my team of teachers and I were brainstorming how to get the kids in our school hooked on science.
We crafted a four-week unit that immersed the entire school in all things Science, based on the book. Because so many of our students had low literacy skills, we designated teachers (and some students and some Juvenile Correctional Officers and some nurses, etc) to be readers, and we read the book aloud in every classroom during 1st period. I’ll never forget on the first day, in my reading room, one kid was totally hostile about having to hear me read. He protested loudly and put his head on his desk like he was sleeping, and he kept saying he didn’t want to waste his life hearing some boring book. Chapter 1…a really graphic, gory scene…the kid’s head popped up and he asked, “What page are ya’ll on?” lol! He made eye contact with me and said, “Stop smiling Ms. Lopez and just tell me what page you’re on.” Got him!!!
The rest of the school day, in every period, teachers correlated their subject matter to Science…they studied infectious diseases, the geography of Africa, the structure of non-fiction written in fiction-like prose, etc…In week 2, we introduced The Hot Zone Activity Menu, a choice menu where students could choose their final project, either working independently or in a group of no more than 3. Every student had a Hot Zone advisor (a teacher that facilitated and guided them through their project). The Activity Menu hit all learning styles, so everyone could choose something they were really good at or something that would stretch them. Every activity had a grading rubric, and students could shoot for a grade of 70 if they wanted to do the minimum, or 100 if they wanted to try to knock it out of the park (guess which one EVERY student chose???). We created a Lecture Series, where we brought experts in, or teachers chose a topic they were interested in, and one day, a student came in my office and said he’d been working with his Geography teacher to research the giant cave that the book posited was the birth of the infection, and he thought I should consider using him as an expert lecturer. So we did. And every kid who asked to lecture thereafter.
In the end, we did a Science fair format where everyone presented their final project (even if it was a research paper. We set them up like it was an academic conference and they discussed their findings) and invited outside guests to attend.
This all sounds familiar to educators, right? It has elements of Project Based Learning, Choice Menus, team teaching, interdisciplinary studies, student empowerment, etc….all evidence and research-based methodologies that we know work. But how often do we see them in prison settings? They should be the norm, and not the exception. I will say that the students were definitely hooked on science after that. For a while, every time anyone had a sniffle, they were convinced it was Ebola, but by the end of the four weeks, they were all experts on infectious diseases, so the panic ended. A former student emailed me last week (which is what made me think of it today) to say he was talking to someone who didn’t know anything about Ebola and then added SMH (shaking my head). It made my teacher heart beat with joy that this now-grown man who’s home, has his own family, and is free from justice-involvement is reflecting on something he learned in science class while he was incarcerated in a prison for children ten years ago. Lots to be sad about in that sentence, but so much joy too, thanks to education.
Later, when I was Superintendent for this system over all the schools, we added virtual reality options for students to dissect frogs and do chemical experiments. Time moves slowly in correctional classrooms, sometimes for legit reasons and sometimes not. If we’re serious about making sure that justice-involved individuals come home prepared to compete in the 21st century for meaningful jobs, then we have to be serious about creatively working together to provide the instruction and exposure they need before they go home.
That’s all.
Enjoy your coffee, tea, OJ, mimosa, etc this morning. If you have the sniffles, it’s probably not Ebola, but if you’re worried about it, I know some experts. :) If you want to explore creativity in locked-down classrooms, whether they be in a carceral space, a detention center, or just in a rut, contact me and let’s talk!
Cheers!
