Aquatic Venture Part of School's Enrichment Effort
By Susan DeFord
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 3, 2003
The fish tanks are everywhere -- in the hallway outside the main office, along the walls of classrooms, in the computer labs at Columbia's Wilde Lake Middle School. Inside are rock-dwelling fish native to African lakes, a miniature ray and shark from the Pacific coral reef, a lobster with taped claws from a nearby Giant supermarket.
The fish are actually bait for Wilde Lake students, who're lured to clean the 28 tanks, conduct science experiments and produce digital images, according to Bob Keddell, who heads Aqua Havens, an academic enrichment program. Launched two years ago, Aqua Havens is part of an innovative, technology-driven venture at Wilde Lake that focuses on underachieving students but also attracts a number of gifted and talented kids.
Although the fish tanks are a focal point of the program, Aqua Havens also has spawned other learning strategies, including a Web site production company. Aqua Havens operates alongside another program, known as Shared Summits, where students follow the exploits of mountaineers online. But from the start, Keddell has remained focused on a single mission: "When you have integrated classroom instruction and computer learning systems, all kids . . . go further."
The after-school activities, involving about 60 youngsters, are supported by grants and corporate involvement and by scientists who donate their time. The program is expected to grow significantly because of a recent $400,000-a-year federal grant to the Wilde Lake community being awarded under the No Child Left Behind Act. That means more children, especially those who don't speak English well, will be able to participate in the school's enrichment program.
Aqua Havens is "totally different from what they do in class," said Valerie Chase, recently retired director of conservation education for the National Aquarium in Baltimore and author of a science curriculum. "For somebody to say, 'What if,' and go off in some direction, it's the best possible way to experience science."
The National Aquarium typically targets Baltimore city schools in its educational outreach program. But it has made an exception for Wilde Lake, providing grant money, arranging field trips and donating a truckload of fish tanks and supplies.
For eight to 10 hours a week after school, 13-year-old Amber Madore straps on a lab apron and conducts science experiments with the fish. This summer she'll spend a week at a research laboratory on the Chesapeake Bay, courtesy of a scholarship offered through Aqua Havens. She's also a member of the eighth-grade executive board that runs the Aqua Havens program.
"We make most of the decisions," Madore said.
Larry Massey-Hall, a sixth-grader who's new to Aqua Havens this year, oversees a tank that harbors a foot-and-a-half-long freshwater eel. Aqua Havens is "cool," he said, and has taught him how to care for a living creature.
"I'm real proud I have the eel to take care of and nobody else does," he said.
Rebecca C. Jordan, a biology research fellow and lecturer at Princeton University, is an online mentor to the Aqua Havens program and helps students design experiments. Their approach to science, said Jordan, 27, is far different than what she encountered in middle and high school.
"We barely did experiments. We were taught what a hypothesis was, but we really didn't know."
"Their questions," she said, referring to Wilde Lake students, "are not elementary at all."
This sophisticated approach is emerging at a school that was stung by notoriety in 1999, when a group of dissatisfied parents hired a bus to transport their children from Wilde Lake to the new Kiln Middle School, located in a more affluent area. There was an exodus of teachers as well from Wilde Lake, which has one of the county system's highest concentrations of low-income and minority students.
Indeed, when Brandon Shifflett got his first job teaching seventh-grade science at Wilde Lake in 2000, other teachers told him, "You don't want Wilde Lake. You're going to have problems with behavior."
But Shifflett discovered that wasn't the case. And he found a mentor in Keddell, who returned to Howard County in 2000 after spending six years developing math and science programs for Baltimore middle schools.
At 51, Keddell absorbs the latest academic research on technology and serves on the faculty at Johns Hopkins University's Columbia center. But he also possesses a boyish giggle that betrays the kid who skipped altar boy studies to go fishing near his home in Upstate New York. He wasn't a goof-off in school, though, and he thinks kids are under even more pressure today to do well early.
"You've really changed course in terms of choices in college if you don't do algebra well by ninth grade," he said.
For disadvantaged youngsters to tackle higher-level courses in high school, they have to erase patterns of failure during middle school, he said. The challenge is getting them to broaden their reach, he said.
At the outset, Wilde Lake Principal Brenda Thomas cautioned Keddell that she didn't have extra money for academic enrichment programs. So Keddell got his first grant of $2,500 in 2001 from a Florida firm that makes concrete fishing reefs and hopes to help replicate the Aqua Havens program in Florida schools.
All told, Keddell has helped accumulate more than $80,000 in grants and donations to expand the array of tanks and outfit three computer labs. This spring, using grant money, Aqua Havens plans to include a project on the Chesapeake Bay, with students growing a saltwater marsh on school grounds and in containers indoors.
"The thing about Bob, he doesn't take no for an answer," said Heather Chirtea, president of Tool Factory Inc., a Vermont-based software publisher that's donated $20,000 to $30,000 worth of software to Wilde Lake.
Online instruction has become a key strategy in math, where many Wilde Lake students struggle. "It's amazing how much more focus they have using computers as opposed to pen and paper tasks," Thomas said. A 10-minute attention span, she said, stretches to 30 minutes on the computer. That means students are doing more math problems.
During a recent after-school session, seventh-grader Kurt Benjamin tallied classroom survey results, calculated percentages and displayed his data on a color-coded pie chart. In only an afternoon, he had learned how to construct the chart on a computer.
"I was amazed how much they could do on their own," said Brian Wessner, a Wilde Lake parent volunteer. In fact, some students, such as eighth-grader Joey Zelenak, have become the experts. He tutored teacher Stevie Kolliegbo on her first PowerPoint presentation.
Keddell is hoping for promising results when the state's functional math test is administered to Wilde Lake and other Howard middle schoolers this week. The tests in reading, writing and math are a requirement for high school graduation, but increasingly they're used as benchmarks in middle school. For the past three weeks, Keddell has given an online practice version of the tests to seventh-graders who have performed poorly in math.
Twelve-year-old Toren Cooke said that when he clicks on incorrect problems, the online test shows immediately how he made mistakes in his calculations. "You can learn what you got wrong," he said. "On paper, you can't see what you got wrong by yourself. You need other people to check it."
Cooke failed the Maryland functional math test last summer after sixth grade. But now he's more confident, even without a calculator that school officials say he's entitled to use.
"Now I think it's going to be a little easier," he said. "I've had a lot of practice."