29 Mar 2017

The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham, is part of the multi-campus University of North Carolina, and the nation’s first public residential high school for gifted students. The two-year, co-ed school focuses on an intensive study of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the STEM fields. To teach there, educators must have a master’s or doctorate degree, and provide the curriculum that sparks the interest in students to study STEM.

Zodiac Webster was one of NCSSM’s early graduates. Today, she is also a physics instructor at the school. For the last six years, she has been teaching a year-long physics class and three elective courses: astronomy, astrophysics, and galaxies and cosmology. As an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, she majored in physics. She later earned a Master of Science and a doctorate in astrophysics at the University of California at Santa Cruz and Berkeley, respectively. After teaching at California State University in San Bernardino and Columbus State University in Georgia, she returned to her alma mater to teach her favorite subject.
“I started teaching to share my love of physics,” she said. “I have been interested in science and math since middle school. My parents gave me math workbooks on our car trips.”

NCSSM is on a mission to provide an intellectually stimulating, diverse and collaborative community to academically talented students so they can become state, national and global leaders in STEM fields.
To advance the school’s mission, Webster came to NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley to participate in its 21st Century Teachers Academy (21CTA). Sponsored by the NASA Ames Office of Education and Public Outreach, and funded by NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, the two-week Educator Professional Development workshop is designed to immerse teachers in best practices and methodologies to develop and implement real-world, Project-Based Learning (PBL) curriculum using NASA missions. The workshop strives to immerse educators in NASA missions, facilities and content, and then helps them repackage the research material for the classroom.

“Students love NASA,” said Webster. “When a teacher loves STEM and can make it more interesting and enjoyable and relevant to students, they love STEM, too. We’ll see this spring how the students respond to our wind tunnel set of activities.”
Webster and Jacqueline Bondell, a team teacher in physics at NCSSM, completed the workshop last summer. This spring, they are building a wind tunnel model for the classroom to practice the NASA-developed 21CTA projects. Her lesson plan is about exploring flight; it will start by modeling free fall (as in a typical physics class), then model flight (in the tunnel with the aircraft wing they received), progress to drag/parachutes (in the tunnel), and finally model helicopters.

“The most rewarding moment is always the ‘aha’ moment, when students reveal for the first time their understanding of a concept. This is the best part of teaching,” concluded Webster.