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Outstanding Independent Middle School Teacher-David Lebson

The Art of the Open-Ended Questiony
The key, Lebson says, to teaching middle school science

David Lebson is the kind of science teacher who encourages students to make educated guesses and speak up when they just don’t understand something.

Through his in-depth, hands-on projects, though, most of Lebson’s students at The School at Columbia University eventually understand what initially seemed mysterious.

“Science teaching is so much about science thinking,” said Lebson, 38. The better he has become at asking open-ended questions over his 17 years teaching middle school science, the more thoroughly Lebson has engaged his students.

Culminating his unit on cells last year, for instance, Lebson teamed up with another science teacher, as well as art and technology instructors. They led the seventh-graders on an expedition through their Upper West Side school building, collecting both live and inanimate cellular specimens.

Next they looked at what they had gathered—a penny, lint and gunk from behind the water fountain, for example—through a microscope. Magnified between 40 and 400 times, the students then clicked and printed photos of what they saw on the microscope screen. The 8?-by-11 inch prints were then hung outside the art room. Lebson and the other teachers invited students from the rest of the school to guess what the photos were.

Teaching sixth grade this year, Lebson, during the astronomy unit, took his students to the Scales of the Universe exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History.

“I really wanted them to come away with understanding how big space is,” Lebson said.

Walking through the 400-foot-long walkway that shows to scale how large planets, stars and galaxies are, one student complained repeatedly that she didn’t understand what Lebson was trying to convey. Something clicked for the girl halfway through the exhibit, Lebson recalled, and she then articulated everything she previously had not grasped.

“It was very exciting for me as a teacher,” he said. Beyond just being happy that his student now understood the lesson, Lebson said he was also heartened that she had voiced her confusion in the first place. “She taught some of the kids in that class more than I did,” he added.

But parent Dina Balderes says Lebson teaches his students plenty.

“He’s not an easy teacher,” said Balderes, who has a daughter in Lebson’s class and works as a researcher in a molecular biology laboratory at Columbia University. “But he has a way of motivating them to reach his goals.”
Many of those goals are tied to specific science concepts. As a scientist, Balderes said she becomes intrigued when she sees someone successfully engaging middle school children with a science curriculum.

But Lebson also teaches non-academic lessons.

“My daughter’s a very soft-spoken girl,” Balderes said. “Now she’s standing in front of the class and is excited about what she’s learning.”

— Michal Lumsden