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Going old school
St. Helen science teacher Giancarlo Cetrulo is telling his students to put down their iPads
Students at St. Helen Catholic School in Vero Beach are in for a treat this year.
Their middle school science teacher and department head of science, Giancarlo Cetrulo, is introducing a new way of teaching. It’s called argument-driven inquiry, a method he learned at a National Science Teachers Associationfellowship last year sponsored by Lockheed Martin and the Bayer USA Foundation.
“The methodology teaches students what it’s like to be a scientist, how to think like a scientist and deliver a product very similar to what a scientist would have to conduct,” said Cetrulo. “It was very time intensive but worth it because it goes into all the steps that are part of the scientific process.”
Before the fellowship, Cetrulo taught science in a way that is common nowadays —digitally. “I said ‘I am going to be cutting edge, an all-digital paperless classroom,’” said Cetrulo.
This meant, for example, he would teach science by asking his students to take pictures of their lab models with their iPads and including them in their lab reports.
But there was a problem.
“I found that they had no recollection of the item in the picture because it would only stay an instant in their mind,” he said. “They need the tactile experience of writing it down because then their actual acquisition of knowledge is much stronger.
“It’s been my observation that students don’t understand and retain information if they don’t write it down for themselves, especially middle-school students, who cognitively are still in transition from concrete to the abstract.”
He talked with his fellowship mentor, Rolland Karlin, who agreed with that observation. Cetrulo says that was the validation he needed.
“It brought me the tools and confidence to implement a new approach.”
Ironically, Cetrulo’s new method to teaching incorporates a more old-school, manual interactive approach such as hand-writing scientific facts. He also learned a more effective way to teach his students how to conduct an experiment.
Instead of what he usually did, which was introducing a topic and having his students implement an experiment followed by a report, he now introduces a topic the students are given background information on and the students are left to design and conduct the experiment in groups, rather than individually.
But it’s the next few steps that have really changed the landscape.
He has the students, in their groups, go around and critique each other. It’s called the peer review stage. The students check things such as whether they did accurate measurements and whether there were multiple trials. “The same thing real scientists do,” noted Cetrulo.
Then, the students have the opportunity to conduct the experiment again, revising it if needed. And after that they do another peer review, and only after all those steps are completed will Cetrulo accept their final paper.
“It’s a long process, but the students learn so much more and retain more of what they are learning,” he said.
Cetrulo is confident his new approach to teachings science will be a success because he already tested it with some of his sixth-graders last year.
The students apparently enjoyed his new methodology, including Elizabeth Burgener, now a seventh-grader.
“When he came back from his conference, the lab we did was much more interactive and I felt like I had more choices on how to do my experiment. It was a lot more interesting,” she said.
While Cetrulo loves teaching his students how to conduct an experiment like a professional, his objective is not necessarily to train them for a career in science.
“For me the goal of being a good science teacher is not to create a bunch of scientists but to create educated citizenry knowledgeable about things like improving the sewage system to benefit the Indian River Lagoon or the positive and negative aspects of solar energy,” said Cetrulo. “It will be important for them to understand as citizens of the planet.”
With such natural insight to students, Cetrulo comes off as someone who has taught forever, but in reality he has only taught for four years. Prior to that, the 44-year-old, who earned his Master’s in Marine Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, worked as a grant writer for local nonprofits, including ORCA and before that was the director of the SEA Lab aquarium for 10 years in Los Angeles.
But he always wanted to teach; however, when he was growing up his father dissuaded him. “He told me, ‘Are you crazy, why would you want to work for peanuts?’” said Cetrulo. “But I always had a calling for it, and it took me 40 years to realize I should not always listen to my dad!”
Cetrulo chose to teach middle-school students because it is the most enjoyable age to teach.
“High-school students are a little too serious for me and they just want to get the job done, whereas you can still have fun with middle-school students and be a little goofy, which fits my nature,” he said with a smile.
And Cetrulo must be doing a great job because more than 1,000 educators applied for the New Science Teacher Academy Fellowship, but only 35 were chosen. The classes were taught online, mostly at night since all the fellows still taught at during the day. They were taught by a “distance mentor,” other well-recognized educators in science.
Cetrulo and the other fellows were required to videotape themselves teaching and their mentors would later critique them, focusing on improving their students’ delivery of information, depending on the students.
“You teach differently for gifted students versus someone operating at a different level,” said Cetrulo.
This kind of critique helped Cetrulo the most.
“My mentor and the NSTA provide great tools with pedagogy and access to the latest science out there. Not just what you teach but how you teach it, which for me is biggest benefit of the program.”
And this year, one of his students will be his son, Sirus. His other child, Sophia, will be right next door. “It’s really a perk of the job to be able to give my children a hug in the middle of the day,” said Cetrulo.