AURORA | Science just makes so much more sense if there’s a narrative behind the dry facts, Susan Mumford-Hartley says.
Mumford-Hartley, a science teacher at Hinkley High School, uses her theory to go one step beyond hands-on in her classes.
Not only do her students focus on projects and experiments rather than lectures; they get to learn the back-story behind every activity.
“If I just took you and said, ‘OK, we’re going to talk about how you isolate proteins,’ you’re going to get overwhelmed,” Mumford-Hartley said. “But … if we have a scenario with the patient and the patient has diabetes, we need to find a way to help them live; and live a normal, healthy life, and we’re approaching it that way … you don’t even feel like you’re learning. You just feel like you’re out there making a difference.”
Mumford-Hartley, who is in her third year teaching at Hinkley, recently won the Ron Mardigian Memorial Biotechnology Explorer Award from the National Science Teacher Association. The award is given to a high school teacher who has made biotechnology available in the classroom, and includes $1,000 toward the teacher’s cost of attendance to the organization’s national contest, $500 cash for the teacher and $250 worth of Bio-Rad products.
Mumford-Hartley teaches specifically within Hinkley’s advanced biomedical careers program, part of the P-20 Aurora LIGHTS Pathway. Her classes are specifically geared toward students who hope to pursue careers in the medical field after graduation.
“She connects real-world scenarios to science and helps prepare students with those 21st-century learning skills as well,” said Hinkley Principal Jinger Haberer, who nominated Mumford-Hartley for the award. “As a former science teacher, I enjoy being in her classroom because she makes learning fun and also rigorous.”
Teaching the rest of the story
Mumford-Hartley credits Hinkley’s science curriculum Project Lead the Way for formatting her project-based classroom.
In her Body Systems class, Mumford-Hartley uses a Project Lead the Way lab that could have come straight from an episode of any crime-drama television show on the air: Some people are missing. Some bones have been discovered. It’s up to the students to identify the bones and try and match them to the missing people.
And yes, Mumford-Hartley has an actual bone kit for her students.
“First of all, they examine the bones and they try to figure out what the age, the race and the gender is of the individual,” she said. “Once they identify that, then we tell them, ‘OK, so there’s three people that match this description, and we’ve asked the families for DNA samples.’ … We use a kit that has various DNA samples and they actually run the DNA against the DNA of the bones to see which one of them matches.”
In another lab, the students test their own DNA to find out whether they have the gene that allows them to taste or not taste a certain chemical on a piece of paper. The back story for this lab? A couple wants to have a baby, but wants genetic counseling to find out whether the baby could carry the gene for cystic fibrosis.
“It’s kind of like, how do we go about finding if somebody has a gene,” Mumford-Hartley said.
In the classroom, Mumford-Hartley has her students perform every step of the experiments themselves rather than just talking about it. They learn to perform commonly practiced lab techniques like micropipetting, and Mumford-Hartley said a former student in the program even recently landed a job at a laboratory using the skills she learned in her Hinkley biomedical classes.
And the involvement seems to keep the students engaged. After a breast cancer patient spoke as a guest in the class, a group of students started planning a self-initiated breast cancer awareness campaign for the school. Mumford-Hartley said they hope to target students, parents and teachers, and will be rolling out the plan later this school year.
“I think our kids are always surprised at how much they learned in the end,” Mumford-Hartley said. “And it’s so painless for them.”
A leader for English language learners
Haberer said Mumford-Hartley also stands out because of her leadership in teaching English language learners, which at Hinkley means about 64 percent of the student population.
“What’s unique about Susan is that she is really effective at differentiating for instruction for students,” Haberer said. “She knows the data on our kids, she knows where they’re at. … I see some of our newer teachers going to her for advice, and especially on how to support our second language learners.”
Most of Mumford-Hartley’s courses are hands-on, with experiments, pictures and diagrams, which helps her non-native English speakers. But even the most interactive science classes have writing components, and that’s where she steps up to help.
Writing is especially challenging for students in Mumford-Hartley’s sheltered biology course, which is designed specifically for English language learners.
“We’re teaching them the core vocabulary for biology, so I’m teaching ‘homozygous dominant,’ but you don’t know how to write a sentences about that, because that’s the only word you know in English,” Mumford-Hartley said. “So we kind of give you the other words that you would need to fill in when you’re trying to explain what homozygous dominant means.”
Dedicated to her students
Mumford-Hartley has put in the time to become the teacher she is today, Hederer said. She has taken advantage of professional development opportunities like summer training to teach Project Lead the Way materials, and training to target English language learners in her classrooms.
“She’s very dedicated to her students, to preparing them to be college-ready so they can access those medical careers when they graduate,” Hederer said.
Aldo Moreno, an 11th grader who is in Mumford-Hartley’s Human Body Systems class, agreed.
Moreno hopes to ultimately become a surgeon or a medical examiner. He said he loves all the “props” that litter Mumford-Hartley’s classroom – the skeleton dummies, the models of neurons and the lab equipment. He loves the labs they get to do, and the extra-curricular science activities Hinkley makes available.
“All those things, usually you wouldn’t do them in a science class,” he said.
But as fun as dissecting a cow’s eye was, Moreno said it’s Mumford-Hartley who makes the class what it is.
“She’s awesome,” he said. “She just wants to teach everybody. She wants everybody to learn. And not all teachers are, like, that devoted to their students.”
Mumford-Hartley didn’t start out as a teacher. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in health science at Arizona State University, but became a business owner after graduating.
“Then I decided I wanted to do something more important,” she said. “(I) decided to become a teacher.”
She moved to Texas and taught science in a school south of Austin for 10 years before relocating to Colorado three years ago.
Mumford-Hartley is also active within the National Science Teacher Association.
The award has given her $1,000 to travel to the NSTA’s April conference in San Antonio, where she will lead two presentations.