Kelli Hansen never planned on being a science teacher.
In fact, chemistry was her worst subject in high school and college but after student teaching in a fifth grade science class, she was offered a job as a middle school grade science teacher at Clinton Middle School, just outside of Oak Ridge, Tenn.
Hansen hesitated before taking the job—feeling inadequate to teach the subject matter well—but she did accept and immediately began to research professional development opportunities for science teachers. She soon discovered the treasure trove of training opportunities in her own backyard through the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education.
“I call them summer camps for teachers,” she laughs. In addition to participating in research and learning techniques for teaching science, Hansen values the collaboration with other science teachers and the exposure to resources.
Hansen’s desire to learn lends itself well to the field of science, something that one of her trainers was quick to pick up on. In a small class on global warming, one of the master teachers, who had been a middle school teacher himself, approached Hansen at the end of the training and told her, “You are going to be great. You definitely have the mind of a scientist.”
That encouragement has stuck with Hansen who says that it changed the way she’s approached learning and teaching. “As a new teacher fresh out of school about to teach a subject I had no background in, those words held so much power,” Hansen says. “I realized that day that a true scientist is born with a desire to chase their curiosities and never stop learning.”
However, Hansen has not forgotten how it felt to dislike the idea of science, and she tries to put herself in the place of her students who may have similar feelings by fostering their natural questions and curiosity.
“Science is not the answers; it’s the questions,” she tells her students. “If you are making the effort to find the answers, that is the science.”
After two summers of STEM training classes and a year of teaching behind her, Hansen is a well-loved and enthusiastic science teacher who hopes to awaken that same desire in her students. “If I can get them to question the world around them and become problem solvers in the classroom, then no matter what the tests at the end of the year say, I've done my job.”