Bengal Spotlight: Kelly (Science)

KELLY FALK
High School Science
Burke Tenure: 2009-Present

What keeps you at Burke?
“The care all my colleagues have for students and one another.”

“Remembering who we are at our core, what we lost and what we’re trying to get back.”

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Now in her 13th year in the Science Department, Kelly has been in the classroom since earning her degree in Physics from Ohio State. “But in teaching,” she remarks, “you continually perfect your craft, and that lends itself to improving every year.” Unique among Burke teachers, Kelly teaches almost exclusively seniors (and the occasional junior). That also gives students a chance to reinvent themselves as they prepare for college. “I have no preconceived notions,” Kelly explains. “Who they are now, as a senior, is who they are to me.”

Nowadays, the capacity to evaluate scientific literature – not just in the classroom, but in the world and in online spaces – has moved to the forefront. Recently Kelly’s colleagues Morgan (Biology), and Allison (Earth Science) presented to their department on the Claim-Evidence-Research (CER) scaffold, “discussing how students can tease out what lies behind a claim and what makes it valid, and why such scientific literacy is much more important now than when I first started.”

Kelly adds, “We can’t compare our kids now to kids prior to the pandemic. They are experiencing their third year of disruption, and we can’t teach in exactly the same way [as before] and get the same results.”