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DMS teacher nominated for national teaching award

Mitch Meier, who teaches seventh grade geography at Dickinson Middle School, is the junior division state nominee for the Hannah E. MacGregor Teacher of the Year--History Teacher Award, which honors teachers who demonstrate excellence in teaching...

Mitch Meier
Mitch Meier

Mitch Meier, who teaches seventh grade geography at Dickinson Middle School, is the junior division state nominee for the Hannah E. MacGregor Teacher of the Year-History Teacher Award, which honors teachers who demonstrate excellence in teaching.

According to the press release, it is awarded to teachers who "demonstrate a commitment to engaging students in historical learning through innovative use of primary sources, implementation of active learning strategies to foster historical thinking skills and participation in the National History Day Contest."

States nominated one middle school teacher and one high school teacher to be considered for the national award. The winning middle and high school teachers will be announced on National History Day, June 13.

Meier uses current events to engage students with primary sources and project-based learning, or PBL, as an active learning strategy. In PBL, students learn through experience.

One PBL in which his students will participate is interdisciplinary, meaning they will work on it in their other core classes as well. Students will create a carnival game, which they will build in their STEM class. They'll study probability in their math class and economics in their social studies class.

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"What we're focusing on is the currency aspect in social studies, and then we'll also be talking about different economic systems. If you're running the game, do you get to keep all of the money that you earned, or does some have to go to the space you're renting out, such as the middle school ... so what kind of economic system does that look like?" he said.

A project in Meier's class that students completed for their Latin America unit involved them researching and creating a poster advocating for an endangered animal.

"They have to explain about their habitat, why they're endangered, what can humans do to make it so that they're not causing the problem. We're helping them to survive," he said.

Every student has to complete the project, but if they choose to, they can enter a contest for a small fee, the proceeds of which go toward the World Wildlife Fund. The winning student gets a stuffed animal of the one they researched.

In order to earn the MacGregor Teacher of the Year Award, the teacher must also participate in the National History Day contest.

For the contest, participating schools have students create projects based on a historical topic. The National History Day organization selects a theme from which the participating students choose their topic. This year's theme was Triumph and Tragedy.

In DMS' geography classrooms, this was a class project. Students could either create an exhibit or write a paper on their subject. The geography teachers chose students to participate in the regional competition, and the winners from it went on to the state competition.

Of the 23 DMS students who went to the state competition, seven were invited to the national competition, including Hope Merritt for The Berlin Wall, Abby Lange and Elizabeth Keele for Stephen Hawking, Katie Welk for London, Samantha Ficek and Rylee Davis for The Salem Witch Trials and Stephen Zawodny for The Girls of Summer.

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"Stephen Hawking was kind of an outside-the-box topic," Meier said. "Their whole topic was about Stephen Hawking about how he persevered through ALS and became a physicist of really great importance. ... It's more down the science line, but the kids that did it were really into science, so they used their own interest to gain a topic, so it was really a little different."

Some of his former students liked the project so much they did it again as eighth graders.

"I had kids come back that were eighth graders that competed, and they did the whole thing on their own time. ... I really think that speaks volumes to just the project itself ... It was something that they found so fun and interesting that they wanted to come back and do it again," Meier said.

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