Carla Biley, a biology and forensics teacher at Richmond County Technical Career Magnet School, recently shadowed two Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) engineers to attain a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Education Endorsement from Augusta University.
The university offers endorsements, or educational programs, for certified teachers seeking additional expertise to augment their curricula. Alongside STEM, educators can earn endorsements in English to speakers of other languages (ESOL), positive behavioral interventions and support (PBIS), gifted education, reading, urban education, and is scheduled to offer computer science next year.
The STEM Education Endorsement emphasizes problem-solving skills such as collaboration and content-integration — or the collecting and cataloguing of relevant information for a particular subject or project.
“This experience added extremely valuable skills to my teaching methods,” said Biley. “Not only will I be able to introduce new classes at our school, but I can implement more problem-based learning techniques that I witnessed from SRNS engineers over the last two days.”
On the first day of her shadowing assignment, the last step in earning her endorsement, Biley saw the day-to-day operations of Process Controls & Automation Engineering (PC&AE), hosted by SNRS engineer Lindsay Minnick.
“If the engineers who are actually in the reactor site needed a code to do their work, she would have to create one and then send it to them,” said Biley on learning about PC&AE department.
There she observed the computer modification tracker, which documents changes and upgrades to the site’s K and L Areas and the program development center in C Area.
“I’d love to see Ms. Biley implement more critical thinking and hands-on work in her classes after this experience,” said Minnick. “Being an engineer means being a top-notch problem solver, sometimes thinking backwards and creating innovative solutions. Educators are key in guiding students to the one-of-a-kind engineering internships and apprenticeships at the Site.”
The second day, Biley shadowed engineers with the SRNS Fire Protection Engineering (FPE). The information she learned here would prove most applicable to her forensic science class, she said.
“We do a whole unit on arson,” said Biley, noting the experience of one of the engineers in fire investigation, and expressing interest in him visiting to speak to her class. “I was like, ‘Whoa, I can teach some stuff to my students that I learned here, that this is why the fire investigators do certain things.’”
Biley pursued the endorsement as part of earning her Education Specialist degree from AU. Though the endorsement is not required, it is “strongly encouraged,” she said, and she thought a STEM program would be most appropriate for her as a science teacher.
“I was very grateful for SRS for agreeing to let me come in,” she said. “The fact that they took the time out to show me some of this stuff, which was the same kind of engineering class processes that we were learning in our STEM endorsement classes… I’m just really grateful that they took their time with me.”
Skyler Q. Andrews is a staff reporter for The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com.
