Featuring Science Educator: Kyle Johnston

    Hi there, my name is Kyle Johnston and I am honoured to share about my experience as a Science Teacher at Centre High Campus.

​I am relatively new to teaching, I completed my Bachelor of Education After Degree from the University of Alberta in 2022. Prior to entering the education field I did a Bachelor of Science at the University of Alberta majoring in Biology and minoring in Chemistry. I chose to go into Science because I loved learning about how the physical world works and diving into Science felt like an endless well of fascinating discoveries. While I was attending University I got a job working with a local youth group with high school and junior high aged students. I decided to pursue education in order to marry my love for Science with the joy I found of working with young people.
    This is my second year at Centre High Campus and it has been such a privilege to share my passion for learning Science with students and work alongside a collaborative staff that strongly shows their commitment to making life better for the students they work with. We have an incredibly diverse student population at Centre High Campus and several students are reattempting a course for the second or sometimes third time. For many of these students, they have a negative preconception of their abilities with science and struggle to enjoy the content of the course because of the weight of their previous performance. One of the most rewarding experiences I have found as a Science educator is to watch the joy on a student’s face as a concept they have struggled to understand “clicks” for them or when a concept is related to a real-world context that is significant to them. Few things excite me as much as watching students who have struggled through figuring out a problem get excited to share their new knowledge with their classmates. I have two quick examples of these “eureka” moments from my recent experience. 
We are blessed to have 3-D printers at Centre High and this last year one of our support staff graciously taught me how to use them. Using the 3-D printers we were able to create manipulatives for Bohr diagrams, DNA structure, ionic compounds and blood typing that helped put a physical model of a difficult concept in the hands of the students. A Science 10 student remarked to me that the puzzle piece model for the ionic compounds put the idea of balancing positive and negative charges into a whole new perspective and they became so proficient at balancing compounds that they began to teach their friends how to do the same. So many excellent 3-D printed manipulatives are available on the internet and I am excited to continue to build our school’s resource library of manipulatives and see more examples of students having difficult concepts come to life for them.

    My story comes from a very recent classroom experience with Chem 20 students. I attended a Teacher’s Convention Session led by Michael Ng on engaging students with inquiry based prompts that related concepts to real-world examples. One of the examples Michael Ng shared involved using stoichiometry to determine whether or not the Apollo 13 astronauts could survive by removing their excess carbon dioxide through a chemical reaction, which matched both the historical and film record of the events. After showing a clip from the 1995 movie I instructed students to get to work trying to “save the astronauts” by putting their stoich skills to the test. I was greatly impressed and pleased by how into the activity the students got, including several students I did not expect to enjoy the activity. One of the students told me that he had never had so much fun doing chemistry because it felt like there were real stakes and he was invested in the solution to the problem. Like the first example, this student after finishing the problem started to help others around him with a humorous amount of zeal for Chemistry.

    I am grateful for the constant education that I receive as an educator. I hope that as my experience and proficiency for teaching grows, so does the frequency of these special moments where students grasp a genuine understanding and share in our love of Science.