March 28, 2024

Rumford's Tony Pirruccello-McClellan: at Moses Brown, "finding science in anything"

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Resilience is a hot topic in education. Teachers and parents help students learn to recover from setbacks in middle and high school, before they confront bigger challenges in college and in adulthood. STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) and arts curricula embrace an iterative process of attempts, failures and new approaches, scaffolding student perseverance and grit. Even teachers hit bumps in the road: Moses Brown School’s middle school science teacher Tony Pirruccello-McClellan had to chart a new course when one of his plans met an unexpected dead end, last year.

He’d planned to mentor San Miguel School’s new science teacher, a recent college graduate, sharing curricula and trade secrets from his own 29 years of teaching and even bringing their students together for collaborative study. “After some fits and starts, though, it was clear that the new teacher simply couldn’t engage with all I’d planned,” Tony reflected. As a volunteer in an underserved school, he was simply stretched too thin.

What to do? Tony decided to double down on his own curriculum planning. “I really enjoy the curricular development aspect of teaching,” he says. “Discovering new ways to model, demonstrate or test an idea is one of the best parts of the job. We can find science in anything. We just have to look.” Recent new curricula include the Yellowstone Wolf Project, which connects to students’ study of Never Cry Wolf in English class and feeds into the Yellowstone summer environmental service trip; and the Rube Goldberg Project, where students build outlandish machines to demonstrate laws of physics. “The Rube Goldberg seed was planted in January, and by April the new unit was ready to go,” Tony says. “It took creativity, communication, collaboration and planning – and a leap of faith. As a professional development experience, it was invaluable.”

Tony has also pursued curriculum development through conferences and travel. At the National Science Teachers’ Association conference in Chicago, he gathered ideas from workshops on 3D printing and iPad use in classrooms. A highlight was New England Ocean Science Education Collaborative’s Ocean Literacy Summit in Woods Hole. “It took me back to my college experience, a SEA semester at Woods Hole aboard the Westward,” Tony recalls. At NEOSEC’s June conference in Newport, Tony was inspired: “There may be a way for our middle school to work with the Oliver Hazard Perry, a 200’ tall ship, and to connect maritime education with our science curriculum.”

Tony’s plans followed multiple paths, rather than the one he’d planned – with immediate benefits to his middle school colleagues and students. “When I started teaching 29 years ago, I chose the middle grades as a stepping stone to the high school,” he laughs. “After a few years of teaching students grades 5-12, I discovered that I was a middle school teacher. I’m totally comfortable with the notion: whenever I’m with kids of this age, I’m in the right place.”

school, science, teacher, Rumford

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