Date Posted 
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Rochellda Adderley9/12/2013 @ 6:05 PMGreat job THS Staff & Faculty!!
Tower Hill School Embraces New Approach to Learning
The new Math and Science Center was the feature story in the Education section of the Sunday News Journal.
Published with permission from the News Journal, Written by Matthew Albright
School officials say the 25,000-square-foot, $7 million facility will double the school’s teaching space for science and math.
The building features six science classrooms with chemistry and biology labs, five math classrooms and a 70-seat lecture hall. It also includes an astronomical observatory, electronics lab and dedicated “drop area” for physics experiments such as the egg drop.
Tom Hoch, the school’s science department chair, said the classrooms are designed to be open and easily rearranged on the fly to meet different teaching demands. All of the desks can roll to fit different calibrations.
“Everything is adaptable. If you want everybody to be looking forward at your Smart Board, you can do that. If you want to put your tables together in a row so you can slide something down them for an experiment, you can do that too,” Hoch said. “The building transforms depending on how the teachers teach.”
Many classroom walls are coated with special dry-erase paint that allows students to write on them anywhere. Many of the desks include built-in lockers for students to keep their own lab equipment and other materials.
Hoch said the goal is to move from teachers doing experiments at the front of the classroom to giving students a task and making them find the tools they need to do it themselves.
“The old days of tables in a row with a teacher standing at the front of the room are gone,” Hoch said. “It’s all about sharing information, collaborating and being flexible enough to have the building suit your needs.”
That theme – that buildings should be useful tools for teachers – runs throughout the school’s plan.
“At its core, this effort is about people and programs,” said Headmaster Chris Wheeler. “Our old science classrooms served us well, but they weren’t meeting our teachers’ needs. So we asked them what they needed and did our best to give it to them.”
Biology teacher Jennifer Romano said she was in her classroom three weeks early making sure everything was set up perfectly.“I walked in for the first time, and my jaw just dropped,” she said. “Honestly, it makes me wish I was a student again.”
Romano’s classroom has a fish tank where she plans to have her students conduct ecological studies. Ample windows provide room for growing plants and for animal habitats. She already has fish with jellyfish proteins that make them glow and a young bearded dragon her students will be able to watch grow.
Across the hall is a chemistry lab where Leigh Thompson teaches. The lab is decked out with chemical storage and prep rooms, an emergency shower and hoods to vent dangerous fumes. “This basically doubled our lab space,” Thompson said. “I feel like a kid at Christmas. It has everything we could ask for.”
School leaders say they’re investing in math and science learning because jobs in fields that use those disciplines are in high demand. Both public and private school leaders across Delaware are scrambling to fix a “skills gap,” as companies struggle to find workers trained in technical fields.
“We think it’s our responsibility to give our students the skills they’ll need to be successful,” Wheeler said. “And in the modern world, science and math are some of the most important skills they can have.”
