A female science teacher at a NYC public school believes the Amplify Science Curriculum is the best PS 583 has to offer. But she’s one teacher, teaching one rigid curriculum, to hundreds of students. Here are the benefits and drawbacks of Amplify.
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by Calliope Speredakos
“Bruce the Turtle lives in an aquarium,” says Denise Aikens, an elementary-grade science teacher at PS 583 Bronx Lab School for Historical Discovery. “Bruce is going to be released in the ocean, and my students have to learn about… his body structure, his defenses, his survival, and if he’ll be safe.”
For most students, elementary school is a formative time, often marking their first exposure to science in a classroom environment. Effective exposure and engagement in science can set students up for a successful trajectory right from the start. At PS 583, Aikens says she strives to equip students with curiosity and a foundation in scientific thinking.
Bruce the Turtle’s odyssey back to the ocean is part of the “Amplify Science” curriculum that Aikens uses, the new core curriculum many NYC public schools have implemented recently.
Aikens, a proponent of the Amplify curriculum, says she admires its ability to engage her students and provide resources that introduce them to the principles of science. She says it makes lesson planning easier for her and her fellow teachers.
Aikens also says that, while she has experienced sexism within scientific fields, Amplify helps her prioritize passion and curiosity over explaining the challenges women in science face later on. “I don’t want [my students] to experience science as if there’s something wrong with it,” Aikens explains. Learning to love and be curious about science takes precedence in her teaching.
Yet Aikens faces enormous challenges in her job. She is the only science teacher in a school of almost 400 students, and she says she is often overextended and burnt out, trying to balance the teaching requirements of 7 grades with not nearly enough time to devote to each student. She even
Denise Aikens, photo from her LinkedIn, 2023
supplements activities for her students using her own money. On the one hand, the Amplify curriculum helps with this burnout. Aikens supports Amplify and says implementing it in her school means she does not spend hours each week planning lessons for different grades. But on the other hand, with such limited time, Amplify’s rigidness means she has a very strict schedule of what to teach and when, and sometimes does not have sufficient time to meet with each grade to get through an entire week of Amplify lessons. At PS 583, there are no perfect solutions.
Aikens grew up in Germany but came to the U.S. to pursue her undergraduate and master’s degrees at the City University of New York. In 2019, she obtained a bachelor of science education. One year later, she got her master’s degree in secondary science education. After completing her master’s, Aikens began working at PS 583, where she has been for the past three years.
The school itself is also quite new–located on White Plains Road in the Bronx, it opened its doors in 2017. The school’s primary focus is history. Yet Aikens says that the burgeoning science curriculum PS 583 offers, with the help of the Amplify curriculum, gives her an advantage over many other public schools in the area.
During her first days on the job, Aikens was delighted to find that “the whole lab was equipped with science material. Microscopes, engineering materials, everything I needed.” District 8, where PS 583 is located, has poverty rates of around 25%. According to U.S. News and World Report, 83% of Aikens’ students are economically disadvantaged. 95.7% of her students are minorities, with the largest group being Hispanic/Latino at 45.1%. Aikens sees this well-equipped school as a boon to this disadvantaged community.
The Amplify curriculum was created by experts at UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science to emphasize evidence-based learning and encourage students to be science investigators. It provides teachers with ample resources to teach each unit effectively, Aikens says. In 2018, the Department of Education (DOE) made it the recommended science education program for K-5, and about 600 elementary schools began to use it, with more joining every year.
Amplify is “not just [teaching students] how to do a science experiment and understand the content,” Aikens says. “Amplify teaches my students about the work of the scientist.” It is about how a scientist succeeds, how a scientist comes up with questions and is curious about the world around them, how they can use this
curiosity to find solutions. Aikens’ students are learning this methodology and using their inquiry and curiosity to engage in scientific models and data. They learn, she says, to express themselves and explain complex topics to others.
Aikens does point out drawbacks. Amplify, with a set curriculum, offers little opportunity for her to move at her own pace. Aikens, who has no other science teachers to rely on to help teach the curriculum, is often overwhelmed.
“Sometimes it’s hard to complete every unit,” she says. “Sometimes I only see a [class] twice a week, which just isn’t enough time.” In instances where time is not conducive to a complete Amplify lesson, she has to make cuts. In class periods that are 50 minutes long, there are times when she has to prioritize certain activities over others. “I don’t see them as much as I need to,” she says. So, in class, “I don’t like to waste time.”
In 2015, a Daily News article came out about NYC’s underperforming public schools–especially in the South Bronx, where PS 583 is located. The article cited Hispanic students as the group with the highest rates of failing the grade-level standardized tests for reading and math. PS 583 was yet to be founded when the article was released, so its demographics are not part of the article’s statistics. Still, PS 583 has a near-majority Hispanic student body. Had the school been opened a few years earlier, it could have easily been part of the article.
Aikens says she has made the most of her limited class time by doing hands-on and creative activities to engage her students. “Amplify can be repetitive,” she says. “It’s always about finding evidence, finding evidence.” So sometimes, she says she will switch out an Amplify activity with one of her own.
Aikens says that once when her students were learning about the structure of an eyeball, she ordered eyeball models for the entire class. She used money out of her own pocket to help them visualize what they were learning about through Amplify. The way she sees it, “It’s one thing to read about [an eyeball], but to actually have one in front of you is definitely helpful.” Another time, she brought clay in and had her students sculpt molecules out of it–it was a fun way for everyone to learn, she says, and it aided her students in visualizing the Amplify lesson.
Aikens does her best to make up for her minimal class time, even outside the classroom, where she is always brainstorming creative ways to better her classroom environment. She frequents teaching workshops to gain more resources and experience. She always asks for free items at teaching events to bring back to her students. She makes sure to collect a lot of her own resources–both physical and mental–to supplement her classroom activities.
For so many teachers, Amplify is the end-all and be-all of science education, she says. But since she already struggles with staying entirely on top of Amplify activities, she often uses Amplify as a backbone instead, a place to jump off from. She knows the negatives of being the only science teacher and is even aware that PS 583’s teacher-to-student ratio is a vast 17:1. Still, she believes that her method of incrementing Amplify with her own special touches is the best way to go about teaching, even when many of her activities require her own money to fund. “I do it right,” Aikens says. “I want to be extra.” It is up for debate, though, if her “extraness” is merely a result of a deficit of science teaching at PS 583 in the first place.
Aikens was also pro-Amplify when discussing her beliefs on engaging minorities, like women, in science. A study published in 2001 in the International Journal of Science Education noted that girls’ enthusiasm for science declines progressively with age, and this decline often starts as early as elementary school. At this time, girls begin to be socialized to gravitate towards more humanity-based classes and boys more STEM-based ones.
However, Aikens believes that with a set curriculum like Amplify, where everyone in the class carries out the same activities
at the same level, no real competition or difference between boys and girls arises in her classroom. “I have some strong girls who are interested in science,” Aikens says, “but then, I have strong boys as well. They are all students, and they are all curious and want to become scientists.” But this again brings up questions. Aikens says she is stretched thin over many grades, with insufficient time to spend with each. One might wonder if she really has time to observe her students with a critical-enough eye to make such a claim. Furthermore, if she embellishes her Amplify lessons as much as she says she does, there is no way of knowing if Amplify’s set curriculum is rubbing off on her students and holding them all as equals.
When asked if she planned to dig into the complex topic of sexism in science with her students to prepare them for the future, she responded with a resounding “no.” She is adamant to not destroy the joy or passion her students–both girls and boys–feel for science and their innate curiosity about so many topics when they are still so young.
Aikens says, “If they don’t see any difficulties in learning, why should I want to tell them?” She believes her job is to excite her students, expose them to new areas, build their science foundations. It is her responsibility to prepare them for something she does not believe they have encountered and may not encounter for a long time. Let their parents or high school teachers have the hard discussions, she says. She has to get them engaged in science in the first place.
For Aikens, Amplify has its benefits. It provides her with a set curriculum to follow, allows her to take creative liberties, and equalizes her students. She says she loves her job and her students and is good at ‘amplifying’ their lessons in ways that she believes supplement their learning. But Aikens is also the sole science teacher at a school with hundreds of low-income students in one of the worst NYC school districts. She is overworked, and Amplify was not created to allow for weeks with a total of just 100 minutes of class time for each grade. Still, Aikens improvises, works around it, and compensates in other areas.
Aikens recently received news that PS 583’s principal secured a $100,000 grant for a new STEM lab set to open next year or the year after. Aikens says she is ecstatic. Yet one might wonder who will be monitoring that lab–whether Aikens’ role as the sole science teacher at PS 583 will expand to more students, more areas to supervise, and more “extra” activities to plan and finance.
For now, she says, “I’m good where I’m at.”
Calliope Speredakos, a freshman at Brown University, is a native New Yorker who loves paleontology and reading.
Commentary:
I decided to do this piece because I had done past service work with some public schools in New York, and know firsthand how disadvantaged the situation is for many of the teachers working in these schools. This piece was the last one I decided on, and since I already knew I was going to write about two other very wealthy institutions (a private NYC high school and a private university), I wanted to balance those two stories with this one. I reached out to other representatives for the story, but only Denise Aikens wrote back to me, meaning I was not able to get as many sources for this as I would have liked. Luckily, there was ample information online about NYC’s public school system and its drawbacks, so I felt like I had a wealth of information to supplement the one interview I was able to conduct. Overall, I really enjoyed the diverse perspective of this story and learned even more than I previously knew about the struggles of a teacher in a NYC public school.
Source List:
Zoom interview with Denise Aikens (4/30)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/denise-aikens-b8408612b/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/09500690010016111?needAccess=true&role=button