Andrew Stillman

I suppose I have been teaching since 1990, when I began work at the age of 14 as a sailing instructor on the Hudson river. In every year since, I have had a job teaching something to someone.

For four summers, I continued my work at the Croton Sailing School, eventually working my way up to become the coordinator of their summer youth sailing program in the summer of my senior year of high school. The job was both enjoyable and stimulating, with full days in the sun organizing regattas, starting water fights, running day trips, designing curriculum, and teaching hands-on nautical knowledge to 9-12 year olds during the week and adults on the weekend.  The kids were generally much easier to teach than the adults!

During college, my interests shifted to other outdoor activities. After a year and a half studying Engineering at Swarthmore College, I wasn’t yet ready to commit to a major so chose to head to the Rocky mountains for some serious outdoor adventure. A three-month course with the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) had me hanging a thousand feet above the ground from a climbing rope, squeezed into narrow passageways in limestone caves hundreds of feet underground, and backpacking for a month in the deep sandstone canyons and juniper hills of Utah.

Before leaving NOLS I secured a job as a crewleader with the Northwest Youth Corps, an outdoor work program for teenagers modeled after the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s, and based in Eugene, OR. Each June, July and August, for 4 summers, I was given a dozen teenagers, a couple of chainsaws, a van, and a trailer full of tents and gear. Each week, we received a set of directions to some remote plot of US Forest Service or BLM land, often 5 to 10 miles in from any road head, where the crew’s job ranged from building a mile of hiking trail, a hundred foot rock wall, or a wooden bridge to cleaning up debris after a logging operation. The crews worked intense 9-hour days outside, often in the remote backcountry of the Northwest, sleeping in army-style tents, preparing their own food from coolers of provisions, and inventing fun songs and games to pass the time. Everyone had to do their part to make the day happen, and this was not always easy for 15-year-olds, so it was often my job to help them rise to the challenge. On weekends we would organize rafting trips, day hikes, or caving adventures to help unwind from the physically demanding work week!

During my first summer in Eugene, Oregon I had grown to love the West coast too much to return to Swarthmore, so I enrolled at the University of Oregon, where I regained my passion for learning and dove into an intense double-major in Philosophy and Physics. I was lucky to have some great professors in Physics who were also pursuing Physics Education Research through a grant from the National Science Foundation. I soon became involved with the NSF-Funded Physics Tutorial program, which allowed me to earn money as a college physics tutor and interact with graduate students and professors who were all studying to better understand the way people learn physics. By the time I graduated, I was interested in combining my experience working with kids with my academic love for Physics, education, and Philosophy.

Because of my experiences, I felt I already had a head start into teaching, so I decided to enroll as a New York City Teaching Fellow, which would take me back to my home state and allow me to begin teaching immediately and get a subsidized Masters degree in Secondary Science Education at The City College of New York. The situation was extremely challenging, but has turned out to be a great deal. In 2001 I was assigned to teach physics and biology at a high school in Brooklyn, mostly serving kids from Bed Stuy and East New York.  For me, the culture shock of being in a tough urban school was really intense. Because science and education have always been so important to me, it was really discouraging to be in a place where I had to fight so hard to get kids to take learning seriously.  I truly felt like quitting on many days in my first year, but gradually I was able to figure out how to get my class to perform.  By my third year, I had the most kids passing the NY State Physics in the history of the school, and was selected by students as “Science Teacher of the Year.” I also wrote my masters thesis on the success of using a research-based methodology to improve deep understanding of Physics concepts, where in one year I had doubled my student’s understanding gains using an NSF-sponsored curriculum I learned from at the Arizona State University summer modeling program. During this time, I had begun to teach myself a lot about technology. My preferred science instructional method uses data-collection sensors, digital video, and laptops for many of the experiments, in which I teach students how to analyze and interpret data using Microsoft Excel and other powerful graphing programs. In eastern Brooklyn, none of this equipment was available, so I wrote grants totaling almost $50,000 to get it!

All this buzz in my classroom led my principal at the time to urge me to apply for the New York City Leadership Academy’s Aspiring Principal’s Program, a paid, year-long program which prepares future school leaders through intensive internships and leadership simulations. I was accepted to this program and was soon interning with the principal of the Beacon School and being groomed to start a new 6-12 school in partnership with the Urban Assembly and the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Bronx Zoo. During this time I was inspired by The Beacon School’s incredible staff and programs, in particular their use of computers to help run the school and enhance learning. During my time at the Leadership Academy, I also got to collaborate with amazing educators at the Bronx Zoo on the startup plans for an exciting new school that opened in 2007 the Bronx.

Still interested in learning more about successful small schools, I chose to leave the NYCLA mid-year and recommence physics teaching at one of NYC’s most unique small schools, The Humanities Preparatory Academy.  Partnered with Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound and The Coalition of Essential Schools, and with only 180 students and a committed staff, HPA fosters a deeply democratic culture in which staff and students participate in school decision-making, mixed-age (9th -12th grade) classes, a strong advisory program, and students and teachers build relationships to support authentic learning. For graduation, students present long-term projects in each subject to a panel of teachers and outside experts for review. In my year and a half at HPA, I learned much about the promises and challenges of putting progressive educational theories into action.  During the summer, I also had the opportunity to teach teachers how to teach at the Buffalo State University's physics teacher preparation program, where I taught a course in NSF-research-based pedagogy called, Powerful Ideas and Quantitative Modeling: Mechanics.

Inspired by the technology I saw at the Beacon School, over the past three years I have stayed up late at night to teach myself how to develop interactive, community websites like this one. I believe that learning communities need tools to help hold them together, and that schools can greatly benefit from having information systems designed with learning and participation in mind. As a side project, this year my wife Jennifer and I have also founded a non-profit organization called Open Educator, which hosts an open source curriculum development community called Open Planner, where the Columbia Secondary School is now doing much of its curriculum development work.

I am thrilled to be working with Dr. Maldonado, Columbia, a talented founding faculty, a pioneering set of students, and to have a hand in helping shape the future of this school, as I have found a team that espouses the culture of learning: a culture of truth and discourse.