Homeroom
Marian Anderson Neighborhood Academy
But his “day job” finds him working with much younger learners, teaching kindergarten through eighth graders in the multidisciplinary makerspace at Marian Anderson Neighborhood Academy in Southwest Center City. As a digital literacy teacher, he uses the technology and tools in the makerspace to involve students in hands-on learning. Smith designed yearlong themes for each grade level to make sure they are developing not just competencies with digital tools but also science and social studies proficiencies. For their “Food Around the World” unit, his first graders make digital cookbooks and solar ovens. For “Plants and Pollinators,” his third graders make robotic models of bees and plants and use a 3D printer to prototype creative planters.
Smith’s innovative pedagogy has won him awards from the Computer Science Teachers Association of Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Chapter of the Pennsylvania Society of Engineers, the National Liberty Museum, and even President Biden, who gave him the 2021 Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching. He’s a researcher, too, studying STEM curriculum and primary source usage in classrooms. That may sound like the work of a PhD, but Smith hasn’t finished his—he completed three years at Northwestern University—and isn’t sure that he will. He is happiest in the classroom and isn’t eager to give that up for the lecture hall.
“I’m trying to be a teacher-leader,” he said. “I think a lot of people think that to be a leader in education you’ve got to be a principal or a researcher or a professor. But I get the best of a lot of worlds by being an adjunct, staying in the classroom, managing grant projects, staying connected to Penn, and running professional development. . . . I can still work on a research project, but it’s based on my classroom and on the work that I do.”
The makerspace, itself, inspires me. The teacher before me had gotten grant money to make the podcast booth happen. . . . And now I have fifth graders working on a wildlife podcast, trying to teach people cool things about nature. I have a first grader right now who’s doing video podcasts about NFL players. It’s on YouTube. . . . I think being in the booth—having a space in school where, as a student, you get to be with your friends and be creative—is important. We can develop projects and supports for them, but the impulse to create something is theirs.
When I was an Einstein fellow, I met someone who’s now a good friend, who teaches outside of Detroit. We wrote a chapter in this book, Best Practices in STEM Education: innovative Approaches from Einstein Fellow Alumni (2nd edition, Peter Lang), about integrating social studies and arts with science teaching and using project-based learning. I’ve been doing work in Michigan over the past four summers, working with teachers around this very topic and facilitating professional development with them.
I host a science fair club after school, coaching students on how to do a science investigation. I’ve got a fourth grader who wants to do something on catapults. So, we’re measuring, building, looking at examples. Right now, this is a Frankenstein of a catapult, because we made a bunch of decisions based on the materials we had, but he is super happy with it. Now we’ve got to figure out how to test it. What’s our independent variable that we’re changing? He’s going to do some measurements based on changing the tension in the line, and we’ll see how it goes. I’ve got another project where we’re measuring air quality in different classrooms around the building. Another student wanted to see at what temperature glass shatters. We’ve got water filtration projects happening. It’s all science, but they get to use this workshop to make their project.
In 2014–2015, I was selected for the Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellowship, and I worked for a year as a legislative fellow with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand from New York. At that time, No Child Left Behind was being reauthorized, and it was actually one of the only bipartisan bills moving through Congress. I helped with some of the computer science and career and technical (CTE) legislation, and I found some Southern senators who were into computer science and said, “Hey, would you work with my Democratic boss to co-sponsor this?” I actually have some amendments in that law that I helped bring to fruition. After that, I was selected to be the first-ever teacher-in-residence for science at the Library of Congress for a year.
In sixth grade, we do “Lights, Camera, Action” as our theme, and one of the things we’ve focused on is stop-motion animation. I ask them to find a culturally significant dance on YouTube and to try and recreate it in stop-motion using these characters. It’s actually the first year I’m doing this. We had been doing a lot of Lego stop-motion, but the Lego minifigures can be really hard for some of the students to manipulate to show the changes in movement. These dolls are perfect. The students can use their Chromebooks to take the photos, and I found an app that is free for them to do the animation because I took a Teachers Institute of Philadelphia course at Penn.