Carmichaels science teacher provides students hands-on learning
Chemistry teacher Kevin Willis helps junior Hunter Phillips, 16, center, and Darren Krause, 18, calculate how many atoms comprise a specific weight of a substance.
Kevin Willis, a science teacher at Carmichaels Area Middle-Senior High School, was chosen as the district’s Herald-Standard Excellent Educator for March 2016. (Photo by Kelly Tunney, Herald-Standard)
Science teacher Kevin Willis with an elk rump and other taxidermied animals he keeps in his classroom, where he teaches numerous branches of science.
Kevin Willis, who teaches chemistry at Carmichaels Area Middle-Senior High School, helps students with a lesson on Avogadro's number.
CARMICHAELS — Science teacher Kevin Willis does a lot of juggling.
Not literally — the beakers in his chemistry lab stay firmly planted on the tabletops.
Willis juggles projects and competitions and field trips and guest lecturers, lessons and assignments and tests and equations.
Somehow, the Carmichaels Area Middle-Senior High School instructor finds a way to fit all of these and more into a curriculum that provides his students hands-on learning experiences and prepares them for life after high school.
One class period he might be directing students in the school’s greenhouse, the next period assisting them to calculate molar mass. One day he could be introducing to his class a guest expert, the next day coaching a team in the Pennsylvania Envirothon competition.
For his commitment to education and enriching the lives of students, Willis was chosen by officials in Carmichaels as the district’s Herald-Standard Excellent Educator for March 2016.
(The Herald-Standard is the sister newspaper of the Greene County Messenger.)
“I tried to push myself and find opportunities that were more than just showing up and doing your job,” said Willis. “We’ve never been ones to just go status quo. We’re always looking to push the envelope, to do some amazing experiences for our kids. That’s why we went after the greenhouse project.”
Willis took the lead on bringing a greenhouse to the school through a grant from the Community Foundation of Greene County. The greenhouse was constructed on school grounds an opened in 2013.
The project gives students the chance to learn outside of the classroom. And it gives the school the opportunity to involve more students in environmental science than those in Willis’ environmental science course, as elementary school and Life Skills students also utilize the greenhouse.
It gives Willis the chance to teach students hands-on as they raise plants for community projects, including a community garden, native tree restoration efforts and a butterfly restoration project on the campus.
Willis admits it’s difficult to fit everything in to an 8-hour a day, 180-day school year, but taking the time to make contacts and set up field trips is ultimately worth the struggle when it provides students with tremendous learning opportunities.
“It’s a challenge because you have to do a lot of juggling. But it goes back to some of the days in the field — I could never replicate that experience in the classroom.”
Last year, Willis received honorable mention recognition for the Presidential Innovation Award for Environmental Educators, which recognizes outstanding teachers who employ innovative approaches to environmental education and use the environment as a context for learning for their students.
The 1991 Carmichaels graduate holds a degree in secondary education from Penn State University, with certificates in general science, chemistry, biology and environmental science.
Upon graduating from college, he said, his ideal job was to return to Carmichaels to teach. He has now worked at the school for 20 years.
Willis teaches environmental science and chemistry classes at Carmichaels, as well as serving as an adjunct professor with Carlow University by instructing a college-level chemistry course at the high school.
Teaching, he said, has always been a passion.
“I thought, I could go and sit in a lab somewhere and try to come up with a cure for cancer, or I could come into the classroom and prepare hundreds of kids to go out and find cures for cancer,” Willis said, noting that many of the students he has taught have gone on to careers in science.
Among his former students Willis counts teachers, engineers, state Game Commission workers and an environmental lawyer.
“I’ve been here a long time. I’ve seen a lot of real success stories,” said Willis, who also acts as National Honor Society sponsor and assists with school wide recycling and clothing and food drives. “I get to stay in contact with some of them. It’s the reason you do what you do. It’s great when they except that challenge and change their lives and say, ‘I’m the one that will make a difference.’
“I always tell them, ‘I think I care about your future more than you do.’ That’s my job is to prepare them for a future that they’re not even trying to get ready for.”
Willis wasn’t always on this path, though. It took the encouragement from his sixth grade teacher and elementary principal to really spark his interest in education.
In turn, Willis accepts the challenge of acting in that same capacity for his students.
“Now that’s my job. I get a chance to take a kid’s life and turn it around. I’ve got to be the one to get them to say, hey in 10 years where are you going and what are you doing now to get you ready for that?
“I want to be that one to make the difference. I want to make the biggest impact on their lives any way that I can.”