STEM recognition for EB Frink Middle spotlights teaching style that engenders curiosity

Social studies teacher Lily Hartsell has been known to stand on a table to help her seventh grade students find a far-away, long-ago location on one of her big wall maps. Names, dates and places are still important touchstones in this EB Frink Middle School class, but not in the rote-learning way that can make a history lesson boring.

For Hartsell and her students, facts become part of the discussion. “The very first day when the students come in, I tell them that not only do I want questions, but that
questions are expected in here,” Hartsell said. “Not only am I hearing their questions, but their peers are. They are learning from each other.”

This process of discovery fuels instruction throughout EB Frink, according to principal Dr. Michael Moon, and is the foundation of the school’s designation by the state as a STEM School of Distinction, one of three LCPS schools – with Northwest Elementary and Contentnea-Savannah K-8 – to claim the honor this past fall.

Whether it’s social studies class or math class, STEM instruction centers on student engagement, where questions are encouraged and answers are often rooted out collaboratively. This inquiry-based learning engenders, as Moon said, “an intellectual curiosity for students” that not only makes a class more meaningful but can also enhance the way they relate to school and to learning over a lifetime.

“My entire premise for social studies teaching is that it does awaken a curiosity and does bring the world to students out of their own inquisitiveness,” Hartsell said. “Seeing those things awaken in them is the most exciting thing to me.”

To her, history is a series of stories. The drama surrounding Henry VIII and his six wives served as an entry point for the study of the British king’s reign in the 1500s. In teaching about the Holocaust, Hartsell connected each of her students with the biography of a person whose life intersected with that seminal event of World War II. All her classes participated – along with 300 other classes throughout North Carolina – in a Zoom presentation by the son of Holocaust survivors, who told the stories of his parents’ lives in captivity and after the war.

“What I try to do is connect them to history in a real personal way, where they can see it right in front of them,” Hartsell said. “Our dates, the places, our data are in there but it’s within the story of history. It becomes an element of the story but is not a list of acts for them to memorize.”

In the eighth grade, social studies teacher Chadwick Stokes shares that view and for nine years has made history come alive for his Frink students, bringing Revolutionary War re-enactors to the La Grange campus, producing student plays around historic events like the Salem witch trials and, most notably, creating the school’s History Lab, where students interact with artifacts and objects of history as would museum-based researchers.

“Why shouldn’t learning be fun, more thrilling, more engaging, more exciting?” Stokes said. “Children are no different from adults in terms of getting their attention. If you have their attention, you are more likely to engage them in the content. You’re going to create more curiosity in them. That’s what education is, getting students to the point where they are curious about what they are being told.”

Because of its acronym. STEM learning was formerly associated with science, technology, engineering and math – to the exclusion of the social sciences and liberal arts. Frink’s principal thinks the school’s STEM recognition shows that kind of thinking is, well, history.

“Our social studies department got highlighted on the STEM application, and I think that was unique for us,” Moon said. “But you’ve got a History Lab where students are engaging with primary source documents from the 1700s, they’re wearing white gloves and lab coats and handling artifacts and that really drives that intellectual curiosity for students. It creates a lifelong engagement with the learning process itself. They are carrying forward these strategies about how they interact with school.”

For students at Frink, the goal is not only to teach them but also to show them what school should be like.

“We want them to get excited about what they can discover,” Hartsell said. “The world can feel very small unless you are exposed to big ideas.”