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Barbara Waters with Robin Geggett;
Mashpee, Massachusetts
 "Asking
a question is harder than giving an answer. My thesis is over
100 pages and I can boil it down to one sentence: Never answer
an unasked question.
I think that over half a lesson should be developed from questions
that the children ask — if they didn’t ask the question, they
really won't care about the answer.”
School at a Glance:
Quashnet School
Mashpee, Massachusetts
Grades: 3-6
Enrollment: 776
Ethnicity:
85% White
7% American Indian
5% African American
4% Hispanic
Percentage of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch:
2% versus a state average of 29%
Barbara Waters is quick to say that she has always liked water. “Ever
since I discovered there were little things crawling around in
the pond in the back yard, I was fascinated.” But she’s also
quick to add that she married into the name. Barbara started teaching
science
in 1959 and, because she lived near the coast, says she felt
like she was always teaching about water in some way. When she went back
to school
to earn her master’s in the early 1980s, she became interested in
watersheds and groundwater, and it was an easy choice to do her
thesis on water. At the same time, however, Barbara became interested
in the
constructivist approach to teaching, which, in the 1980’s, was not
yet strongly advocated to classroom teachers. For her master’s thesis,
Barbara combined her two interests, and one of the results of
her work is the grades 4-8 curriculum Watershed to Bay: The Raindrop Journey.
For the video, Barbara worked with Robin Geggett’s fifth graders
at the Quashnet School in Mashpee, Massachusetts, which is on
Cape Cod, a peninsula off the coast. Robin is in her fifth year of teaching,
and
has used Barbara’s curriculum in the past. “Mashpee is a community
that has to be really concerned about their water — dumping from
a local air force reservation led to some groundwater plumes,” explained
Robin. Groundwater plumes result when contaminants have filtered
into the groundwater, making it unsafe to drink.
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