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sciencewithmrenns@gmail.com
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Science With Mr. Enns
Hi, I’m Douglas Enns!
Over my 25+ year teaching career, I have taught chemistry, biology, physics, anatomy, earth science, and computer science at the middle and high school levels in both rural and urban schools. After graduating from teachers college in Ontario, Canada, I began teaching as a long-term science sub at a small country school. Shortly after, I relocated to the United Kingdom, where I taught in several comprehensive schools across London over a period of 3 years. Desiring to return to North America, I took a position at the United Nations International School in New York City, where I taught middle school science and served as curriculum coordinator for 10 years. Following my time in New York, I took a position at an independent school in Kansas City, where I now reside. Currently, I teach middle school science and serve as the head coach for our school’s Science Olympiad team.
Structured Rigor, With Fun
As my teaching career progressed, I became frustrated with the textbooks I was required to use. They either had too much information and few visuals, or too little information and simplistic labs. So, I began making my own resources, starting with colorful slide decks that summarized entire units, and then coordinated readings, labs, games, and assessments. I noticed that my students responded well to the way the material was presented; it was clear enough that they could grasp the content without confusion and detailed enough that they felt intellectually stimulated.
My philosophy when designing resources for my own classroom is what I call “structured rigor, with fun”. I never hold back when it comes to rigorous content or high standards. I feel that when science is presented in an organized, clear, and approachable manner, most students will work as hard as they can to achieve and be proud of themselves when they do. In addition, using my own materials in my own curriculum allows me to quickly identify what knowledge and skills my students possess early on in my class, what they need to develop by the end of my class, and what they need to be ready for beyond my class. Being organized and systematic with content and skills in the background allows me to be relaxed during my lessons so that I can share in the challenge and fun of learning and mastering things with my students.
In 2016, I began selling my materials on TpT. As the number of products grew and my store grew, so did my motivation for creating products that are designed to work together and aligned with most national standards. I am thankful that TpT gives me the opportunity to expand my reach from my single classroom to other educators, parents, and students.
I have been inspired by a number of teachers in my life. I would like to specifically mention the professors whom I worked with as a student in the Biology and Pharmacology Program at McMaster University, Canada. This program was built around their innovative (and frequently copied) problem-based learning or PBL model. Each or our lessons was composed of 6 students and 1 professor and typically lasted 3 hours. Unlike most university classes where a professor lectures to a passive audience, each of our classes was planned, taught, and evaluated by the students themselves.
To start, the professor would present us with a “problem” in the form of brief description of a patient’s symptoms and their health history. Then, it was up to the 6 students to agree on the best course of action to solve the problem. We we would typically start by collectively determining what we knew and what we didn’t know. From there, we would pair ourselves off and head to the medical library to research our chosen part of the problem. The team would reconvene 1 hour later so that each pair could teach the rest of the team what we had found. Once all of the new information was presented, the team would then determine if our new knowledge allowed us to make a conclusion. If we were unable to do so, we would repeat the process until the team was satisfied. One of the most memorable things about those classes was that the professor never told us whether we had solved the problem or not. I distinctly remember the first time we asked if our solution was correct. The professor took off his glasses, smirked at us and said, “Who am I to tell you that? You did all the work. I am only your guide.”
Ironically, it was my positive experience in the pharmacology program that stopped me from becoming a pharmacologist. With each successive lesson, I came to the realization that I was far more interested in the WAY the content was being taught than the content itself. I eventually left the program to pursue a career in education and have never looked back.
As a teacher of middle and high school students, I realize that I am not able to duplicate the synergistic, collaborative style of learning from those pharmacology lessons. There are practical limitations of class size, resources, and time. There are also pedagogical limitations of preexisting knowledge, uniformity of skills, and maturity. However, I believe that with the right approach, students of all ages are capable of the type of flexible, critical, and creative thinking that my pharmacology professors tried to instill in us.
Instead of big student-led projects, I try to do things in small bites. For example, I often present “real life” problems that students have to figure out using prior understanding or experimental results. For example, for a unit on thermal energy transfer, I may first ask students why their bare feet feel warmer stepping onto a bath mat rather than a tile floor, even though both are at the same ambient temperature. This “problem” would be followed by the students sharing hypotheses, performing structured lab activities, reading about heat transfer, and finally, creating a claim with suitable evidence
As I incorporate this teaching style into my lessons, science becomes less of a subject and more a way of thinking. In other words, one doesn’t learn science as much as they do science. In my opinion, one of the best things about teaching science is that it can be messy, challenging, surprising, and fun, often at the same time. What I see in elementary science classes are young students approaching each topic with an incredible sense of wonder and excitement. I feel that the key to preserving that essence in older students is by presenting science as a method of exploring the mysteries of life that students have to perform, not memorize, to gain deeper understanding of their world.