Science Teachers Get Honored, Too

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Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 3/24/2008 1:00:00 PM

After recognizing science students for the past nine years through its Young Scientist Challenge, Discovery Education decided it was time to award the folks who encouraged these kids in the first place—their teachers.
“As we move into our 10th year, we feel that it is important to highlight the impact that an inspirational teacher can have on students,” emailed Stephen Wakefield, Communications Manager at Discovery Education. “We also want to enable educators to share engaging techniques for teaching difficult concepts—‘pain points’ that every student needs to grasp before they can advance in a particular scientific subject.”
So as part of this year’s contest, teachers are being invited to create a video that illustrates one of five main scientific concepts—acceleration, aeronautics, centrifugal and centripetal force, scope and scale, and Newton’s Laws of Motion. All contestants must be members of the Discovery Education Network (DEN).
Five educators will win a trip to Washington, DC, to appear at the final competition later this summer, with the top teacher honored as DEN’s Science Teacher of the Year. Wakefield says other prizes will be announced within a few months.
On the student side, the Young Scientist Challenge has been a huge success for DEN—pulling in 560,000 middle school nominations in the past nine years, according to Wakefield. There’s hope the teacher competition will engender as much excitement and interest in educators—just as they inspire and provoke a passion in their students.