By Lini S. Kadaba
As a freshman, P. Isaac Quelly ’19 was struggling with the calculus concept of limits. But then a faculty visitor to his engineering class gave students a mini, hands-on project: Find a shape that maximizes the surface area of a wad of modeling clay. Like that, limits made sense.
“People tried different shapes, circles, squares,” says Quelly, 21, an architectural engineering pre-junior from Washington, N.J. But the greatest surface area came from breaking the clay into smaller and smaller pieces, ad infinitum. “That leads into the idea of limits. That connection had been unlocked for me.”
The sample hands-on lesson was part of a pitch for Drexel University’s DragonsTeach, and Quelly was hooked.
Part of the national UTeach based at the University of Texas at Austin, the program offers a way for non-education, STEM majors to explore teaching and earn secondary teaching certification while pursuing their degrees and co-ops. DragonsTeach, a collaboration among the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Engineering, and the School of Education, is supported through a grant from the National Math and Science Initiative.
Since the program started three years ago, about 170 students have delivered more than 200 inquiry based STEM lessons to K-12 students in Philadelphia. This school year, DragonsTeach was a winner of the Drexel President’s Awards for Civic Engagement.
“I had always admired teaching,” Quelly says. “I decided to give it a shot.”
Since he joined DragonsTeach, the would-be physics teacher has not only taken education-related courses but also stepped into classrooms from the get-go—one of the hallmarks of the program. That way, students figure out early whether teaching is for them.
“I found out I loved it,” he says. “I came to Drexel not knowing what I wanted to do. DragonsTeach gave options for other possible careers.”
After graduation, Quelly says he plans to teach while he weighs his future. “I do love engineering,” he says. “But I might be called into the classroom.”
Quelly taught his first lesson to third graders. It explored sound waves. “We got them excited by showing them how you could see sound,” he says. A tuning fork was hit and then placed in a cup of water. Waves rippled.
“We’re very anti-lecture,” Quelly says. “The idea is that they’re doing an inquiry-based lesson to actually solve the problem and answer the question themselves without us telling them what it is.”
DragonsTeach participants begin fieldwork at the elementary school level, then progress to middle school and finally high school. They also study topics such as classroom management techniques, different learning styles, and education research methods. Students are paired with mentors who teach at the Philadelphia schools, and Drexel “master teachers” observe and offer feedback to students as they present lessons.
More recently, Quelly designed a mini physics unit and taught it to high schoolers in a chemistry class. It involved designing a battery and circuit to light a bulb by converting solar energy into electrical energy. In the fall [2016], he taught a unit on bridge structure design by way of spaghetti and marshmallows. Students got deep into Newton’s Laws of Motion.
DragonsTeach inquiry-based approach, Quelly says, differs from his own experience. “As a teacher, I hear them loud and engaged,” he says. “That doesn’t look like what the classroom looked like for me. I had to fight the impulse to say, `Be quiet. Do your work. Settle down.’”
But the engineer in him loves this type of classroom. “The learning is completely hands on,” he says.
Quelly enthusiastically encourages engineering majors to consider the program, even if their goal is industry. “Just because you’re getting certification in teaching, doesn’t mean you have to stay in the classroom, doesn’t mean you can’t use these skills in engineering. Education is universal.”
Quelly argues that the program makes for better explainers, a useful skill on the plant floor or start-up. “I found out some of my strengths and weaknesses, and it was eye opening,” he says.
Last academic year, Quelly participated in the 2016 UTeach Conference at UT-Austin, and he won the program exhibition section for a poster about DragonsTeach. He also started, along with other students, the DragonsTeach Student Organization at Drexel to plan outreach events. Quelly is the vice president and outreach chair. In addition, he serves as a peer mentor for DragonsTeach classes.
“DragonsTeach,” he says, “has become my life.”