Use this search box to find articles that have run in our newspapers over the last several years.
Date: 3/17/2022
NORTHAMPTON – Two educators at Northampton High School (NHS) recently won the 2022 Harold Grinspoon Excellence in Teaching award, according to a recent announcement by district Superintendent John Provost.
NHS Math Department Chair Anisa Schardl and Special Educator Rebecca Herskovitz won the award that honors more than 100 Western Mass. educators in Franklin, Hampshire and Hampden Counties, “and seeks to motivate teachers at all stages of their careers to aspire to excellence.”
Schardl told Reminder Publishing that she was initially surprised by the award since she originally had no idea what was going on when the entire Math Department and other school district staff came into her classroom one day while she was teaching. “It was just really overwhelming to have all those people there, and feel all the love,” said Schardl. “It was really exciting.”
According to Schardl, this is her first year at NHS as the Math Department chair and third year as a full-time teacher, overall. Before that, she was going for her master’s in teaching and student-teaching at NHS in the Math Department. Before teaching at NHS, she was a linguist at UMass Amherst, a profession that expanded her already sizable love for problem-solving and puzzles.
“I’ve always loved math,” said Schardl, when asked what inspired her to pursue the subject. “It’s always been something that I’ve loved while growing up and going through high school. When I was in academia, I was always very interested in teaching.”
She specifically wanted to pursue teaching math after becoming a private tutor following graduate school. “When I got some students who wanted me to tutor them in math, it was like coming back to an old friend,” Schardl said. “That really made me want to go into teaching math.”
Schardl said that being acknowledged for a profession that is important, as well as one she loves doing, is one of the more rewarding aspects of being an educator in math, along with watching a student make a breakthrough as a learner. “When you’re a teacher, people see when you teach well, and they say nice things,” said Schardl. “To be doing something that I want to do, and have that same thing be acknowledged as important…that’s what feeds me.”
As an important figure in the department, Schardl is continuing to emphasize a model of teaching in math that embraces more problem-solving, as well as the development of life skills that students can utilize in whatever profession they embark on in adulthood.
“What we’re doing at NHS is really a very different model of teaching math,” said Schardl. “We don’t lecture very much at all. Instead, what we do is we administer problems that are open-ended, and we put the students in groups, and we give them those problems and ask them to tackle them.”
Through this method, the teachers in the department emphasize working together, and as a teacher, Schardl will walk around to each group and push the students to think deeper about these problems. After all the groups explore these problems, the teachers will then have each group explain the different ways in which they approached the problems. “It’s the opposite of a lecture…in this, no one is doing the same thing at the same time,” said Schardl. “There’s flexibility to allow [students] to approach the problems in any way they need too.”
Through this creativity and dynamic skill-building, Schardl said that the students’ time is being spent more valuably than if they were just watching a teacher lecture throughout a whole class. “It’s so much cooler to do things this way,” she added. “Students in our school are doing math rather than watching math.”
Schardl admits that it was tougher integrating this type of teaching method over Zoom during the worst of COVID-19 due to technological constraints, but the department still adjusted the best they could and put students in groups over the computer by utilizing a large Google Doc. “It was really tough, but I stuck to it the best I could,” Schardl said, referring to her more team-oriented approach to teaching.
The department was able to garner a stronger foundation with their students once school reopened again. They focused more on recovering from lost in-person time by teaching a class like Integrated Math, which is usually a one semester course, over the entire school year so the department can take their time with the students during a unique period.
As far as the future goes, Schardl said she is excited about the department rolling out a new curriculum that will make it easier for the teachers to teach in the aforementioned style, where collaboration and multi-faceted problem-solving is emphasized. They are in the process of rolling out the curriculum, and Schardl said she was able to start it last year.
“Everyone’s really excited about the curriculum, because it’s just so easy to use with the way that we are trying to teach,” said Schardl. Additionally, Schardl is really happy with the fact that the math department has become tighter knit as a group, as evidenced through a group chat that they have used across the pandemic. “[The group chat] has created this teamwork culture that didn’t really exist before, but we were all ready for,” she said. “We all really like each other, and we’re all ready to work together. It’s really helped us to do our jobs better.”
Herskovitz did not respond to comment, as of press time. There were other Grinspoon winners across the district that Reminder Publishing will have more coverage on in a future edition.