Lionel Sandner
Lionel Sandner's students and colleagues praise his ability to excite science students. He led the development of a self-paced science unit based on a "murder mystery" that has been a hit at Stelly's Secondary School in Brentwood Bay, British Columbia. Under his leadership, Stelly's School began the first science career preparation program in the district. Lionel also pioneered the innovative design of the school's new laboratory.
Lionel has the ability to motivate his students inside and outside the classroom. One student states, "His class is the highlight of the day." Another recalls, "Physics became an adventure rather than a chore." Students from Stelly's School have won scholarships to universities, as well as awards and medals in provincial, national and international science competitions.
Approach to teaching
"There is more to school than the classroom."
Every day when I walk into the classroom, I believe that each student has the potential to succeed in science. It is my job to help him or her discover this potential. Implicit in my philosophy is my belief in the ability of students to develop skills and attitudes that will assist them in the future.
Individualized curricula give students the chance to learn at their own rate, and allow the teacher to adapt the course content to the abilities of the students. Assessment techniques that don't rely on examinations let students demonstrate that they do learn from non-traditional exercises and challenges.
I want students to experience science. I use toys, games, stories and puns to help fix concepts in my students' minds, because my ultimate goal is for them to be able to use these ideas in their lives.
Transferable experience
I developed a forensic science unit for Grade 10 students that allows them to work through a variety of labs individually at their own pace. I developed the unit on my own one year when faced with a rambunctious class of students with many different styles (and speeds) of learning.
In the unit, the students solve a fictional murder using various scientific techniques. The "murder inquiry" progresses through 20 or 25 classes as the students acquire more and more information through their experiments. For example, they compare fingerprints, analyze synthetic blood and urine samples, and calculate the time of the crime by radioactive half-life. I also give them fictional police reports and newspaper articles that contain vital statistics on the victim and the suspects, including their fingerprints and details of their movements at the time of the crime.
Eventually, the students build up a matrix of information that helps them solve the crime scientifically by eliminating suspects who could not have committed it. During the process, they learn about blood types, fingerprint comparison, Geiger counters and urinalysis; they also use deductive and inductive skills to interpret the evidence.
When all the students have completed the work and stored their results in a portfolio, they complete a final exam that uses the information collected to solve another crime. This way, the final lab exam and the final grade are based on what students can do, as opposed to what they may have memorized. Only a small proportion of the total mark is for finding the criminal. The remainder of the mark is for doing the work and going through all the processes correctly.
Each part of the unit teaches a specific skill or process, such as observation, experimentation, classification, research or prediction. The unit also crosses disciplines, including physics, biology, chemistry and math. It can easily be adapted to other grade levels by teaching selected parts of it to younger students or by expanding the subject matter to tie in with curricula in higher grades.
In classes where there are students with a variety of learning abilities, I have often found that students who finish the work early immediately begin to help others. They may also go to the library to learn more about a particular subject in detail.
Over the years, the unit has grown to include presentations by local police officers on detective work and the science involved. My lab assistant and I have also developed methods of testing synthetic blood and urine that allow students to obtain accurate results without coming in contact with real body fluids. To get away from the crime theme, we are looking at other scenarios for the unit, such as an Indiana Jones-style mystery.
This unit always captures the imagination of the students. It can be a lot of fun for the teacher, too. There are many instances - I call them teaching moments - where I can share the joy of scientific discovery with my class.