Susan Linscott, High School Science Teacher at Lee Academy
Susan believes in the practice of place-based, community-based, and inquiry-based learning. She provides her students with engaging experiences in local forests and requires that they design and deliver forestry lessons to local elementary school students. Susan takes her students beyond the academy’s walls to explore and assess community projects involving town culverts that impact water quality, fish habitat, forest health, and the local economy. While attending a Maine summer teachers’ tour, Susan learned about the intricacies of culverts from forest managers and engineers. She went on to write a stream crossings lesson and shared this STEM unit with the PLT network. When a spruce budworm outbreak was observed in nearby Canada, Susan designed and shared a unit of study on this critical issue.
Read more about how she uses community-based investigations to give students opportunities to make real world decisions, meet community needs, and explore what is happening in their own neighborhoods as the foundation for learning cross-cutting concepts.
Susan was named a National PLT Leadership in Education Award honoree in 2018.
Vanessa Bullwinkle
Vanessa Bullwinkle
