Science, out of the classroom

Charlottesville and Albemarle County public schools are working with middle school students to develop their math and science abilities.

The Odyssey 2025 Summer Academy, which won the Virginia Math and Science Coalition “Programs That Work” award in May, is only in its second year and already teachers have seen an improvement in students participating in the program.

It’s “neat” to see the students grow from summer to the fall, said Jessica James, a sixth grade science teacher at Jack Jouett Middle School who taught in the program during its first year and is now the lead teacher trainer. James had four students who took part in the first Odyssey program in her class this past fall.

“You could definitely see … they could lead, but not in a way that ruined it for the others,” James said.

Rising sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders work with teachers in a problem-based curriculum from the JASON Project, which was started in 1989 by Robert D. Ballard, the explorer who discovered the wreck of the Titanic, said Chuck Pace, Albemarle County public schools science coordinator.

Odyssey has three programs from the JASON Project: Operation Monster Storms for rising sixth-graders, Operation Resilient Planet for rising seventh-graders and Operation Infinite Potential for rising eighth-graders. The students cover information from the programs as part of their normal curriculum in their respective grades the following school year.

Enrollment in the program is made up of about half city and half county students, Pace said. The students are drawn from Jack Jouett, Walker Upper Elementary School and Buford Middle School.

Odyssey isn’t specifically for gifted students, Pace said. Coordinators and teachers try to bring in at-risk kids as much as they can.

The Public Education Fund of Charlottesville-Albemarle funds the program on a year-by-year basis. Lisa Ross, a PEFCA board member, said the nonprofit organization will continue funding Odyssey as long as it continues to prove to be a valuable tool for improving teaching practices and students’ learning experiences. PEFCA hopes the program will help students catch up with the rest of the world in the areas of math and science.

“National statistics say if a child believes they aren’t good at math or science at that late middle school age, then that will be the track they follow the whole way through [their education],” Ross said.

As much as the program is for the kids, it’s also a great place to develop teachers, said Jessica Kalagher, coordinator of science for Charlottesville city schools. With this program, the teachers do less formal teaching and more facilitating of the children and encouraging them to work problems out themselves, Pace said.

“If you want kids to be taught differently, you have to train teachers differently,” Pace said.

Kalagher and Pace feel that altering the teaching style is the most effective way to get more students interested in science classes, Kalagher said. It’s “two birds with one stone” — not only do students learn more, but teachers get more experience in problem-based teaching that they can take back to their classrooms and to students who didn’t participate in the summer program, Kalagher said.

And teachers are excited to try a new method and see their students get excited about science, James said.

“It helps people say ‘yes, this is something we can do in our classrooms,’” James said.