Coronavirus can’t keep teachers Heather Behrens and Diane Bugler from working with their students to continue studying water quality in local ponds.
Before school closings were mandated last month, Behrens’ Higgins Middle School seventh graders and Bugler’s Brown School fifth graders were testing and monitoring water in Brown Pond and a small pond near Higgins, with a focus on seasonal changes, looking at macroinvertebrates that indicate water health, and testing for other changes in PH, salinity, and turbidity.
Those science words translate into plenty of data collected and research to study with Behrens and Bugler guiding their students through the study process, even as teachers and students alike are home obeying coronavirus precautions.
They hold online virtual meetings and guide their students through organizing the water samples and research they gathered along the ponds last fall.
“Our student teams are so excited. Every day one of them is saying, ‘Let me do it.’ Our goal is to cultivate a group of kids who can get out there and get data,” Behrens said.
Essex Heritage, the National Park Service, Salem Sound Coastwatch, and Peabody Leatherworkers Museum work with Behrens, Bugler and other teachers across the North Shore to support educational projects.
The Leatherworkers Museum helped the Peabody students connect their pond studies with Peabody’s industrial history and the role water supply played in that history.
Essex Heritage and the Park Service are education resources Peabody schools and schools across the North Shore rely on to enhance curriculums.
Both agencies, according to their websites, offer a professional development program that supports educators in creating projects with their students that use their communities’ natural, cultural, and historic resources.
Based on the training they receive through the Park for Every Classroom program, teachers work with their students and local partners to create academically rigorous projects that serve their communities.
Program examples include the breakfast for local veterans, organized by Veterans Memorial High School teachers Abbie Gore and Maureen Kelly, who worked with their students and community partners to organize an oral history project with more than 100 local World War II and Korean War veterans in 2014.
According to a testimonial posted on the Park for Every Classroom program website, the breakfast gave Peabody Junior Rotary high school students a chance to ask veterans questions about their service.
Many of the veterans brought service and personal pictures to share, and were openly moved by the reactions of the students.
The breakfast represented a collaboration among Veterans Memorial’s Air Force Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, who served as veteran escorts; Culinary Arts classes who provided the pancake breakfast; a performance by the high school chorale rifle drill by Air Force JROTC.
The veterans’ initiative paralleled another Park of Every Classroom project locally with four Higgins Middle School classes teaming up with the North Shore Mall to create an interactive history-based walk for mall visitors to enjoy.
School Technology Integration Specialist Jarred Haas developed a place-based service learning project with history teacher Anthony Furnari.
The teachers and their students are working with partners at the Northshore Mall, Peabody Historical Society, and the Peabody Institute Library to research the history of the property where the Northshore Mall now stands.
Students will eventually create a walking circuit with historical panel stops featuring interactive web-based content that can be accessed via “Quick Response” or QR codes.
Mall visitors will use their mobile devices to get a glimpse of the unique history of the mall property, according to the Park for Every Classroom website.
From Native Americans, to early settlers, to modern-day businesses, the stories of the mall property that students uncover and share will give shoppers, walkers, and all other mall visitors the opportunity to understand the layers of history that have affected the North Shore region.
For example, the “Eppes Winter Sweeting Apple,” named for settler Daniel Eppes, was developed on site when the property was an orchard in the early 1700s.
While their research is about the past, the students are developing decidedly modern skills. Students will be conducting interviews with mall users and businesses, creating interactive websites, and working collaboratively via web-based document sharing as they connect with their “place” through the project.
Teachers see this as a multi-year project which may involve more disciplines over time, and have created a website to document project progress.
Behrens said student research and write-ups for the Higgins and Brown pond project will be gathered into a “field guide” the students can keep and show off as a point of pride.