Episode 86 – Urška Manners – International Modeler
Urška and Mark talk about her experiences teaching using modeling instruction at International Baccalaureate schools, including the tension teachers feel when students have a specific exam to pass at the end of the year but the teacher wants to really dig into material and help students to think deeply. They talk about how modeling instruction teaches students to think like scientists, not just give the right answer on a test. She encourages teachers to try new things and don’t be afraid to fail.
Guest
Urška Manners
Urška Manners is half-Slovenian and half-American and grew up attending an international school in Vienna. She graduated from Brown University with a degree in geophysics and then earned her Ph.D. in seismology from UC San Diego. In between college and graduate school, she spent two years in Guinea with the Peace Corps, where she worked as a math teacher at a local high school. That experience made her realize that she was ultimately a teacher at heart, and after graduate school, instead of pursuing a career in academia, I decided to become an international school teacher, primarily teaching high school physics. Over the past 19 years, her teaching career has taken her to seven different countries: Mali, Slovenia, Uzbekistan, Romania, Hungary, Brazil, and, currently, Switzerland. She took her first Modeling workshop in 2019 and has never looked back.
Highlights
[18:43] Urška: “I think when students learn science by doing science, it becomes something real for them.”
[20:29] Urška: “I think especially right now when scientific literacy is so, so important, because there’s so much misinformation out there, we need students who can think.”
[22:35] Urška: “I think it’s good for them to see that I’m constantly trying to change what I do and that sometimes I fail because I think being able to fail is a really important skill and it’s really good for students to see that as well.”
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