Alea Rubin Evens started her year-long residency at Central Falls High School excited to help her curious group of biology students develop scientific knowledge and thinking strategies. In working with her students and Dr. David Upegui, Brown’s Teacher Residency Site Leader at CFHS, she found that honing student writing skills could help achieve stronger scientific reasoning and success.

“I wish for my students to access any science opportunity they want for themselves, find success when they enter spaces that have historically excluded them, and ultimately transform those spaces to be inclusive and equitable,” Alea said. “Using scientific data and principles to support claims is an extremely valuable skill that allows students to be successful as they pursue higher-level challenges in science.”

In her capstone project, “Claim-Evidence-Reasoning: Supporting Writing Development for High School Biology Students,” Alea utilized the Claim-Evidence-Reasoning (CER) framework, a scaffold to help students develop scientific reasoning and argumentation skills. Students completed four CERs throughout units on genetics and evolution. She found that nearly all her students performed better on the final CER than the first, indicating the framework’s success in developing stronger writing skills.

While most of her students demonstrated growth, Alea noticed that the framework particularly helped multilingual learners (MLLs), or students developing proficiency in multiple languages. By providing a structured scaffold focused on language development, MLL students could more easily apply their content understanding and succeed in demonstrating their scientific reasoning.

“I learned that writing is not an innate ability. It requires some direct instruction, lots of practice, and opportunities to implement feedback,” Alea said. “Science teachers are language teachers, too.”

Her MLL students' growth inspired Alea to continue working with international student populations. Next year, she will teach a ninth-grade classroom of sheltered newcomers, MLLs who have been in the U.S. for less than a year, at Roosevelt High School in Washington, DC. She plans to bring her students the CER framework and the culturally responsive perspective she developing in the MAT program.

Reflecting on her experiences at Central Falls and the MAT program, Alea recommended that future MAT students take advantage of the collaborative environment, work closely with their mentors, and face their fears.

“Take some risks, whether that means leading part of a lesson early on, teaching a more involved lab than you’re used to, or asking other teachers to observe you teach and give you feedback. Everything is scary the first time, but not nearly as much the second or third time.”
 

Favorites:

Event: "My favorite event was the Paint and Sip night with MAT and UEP AM students."

Place to study: "I enjoyed studying in the corner room in the Ed Department with lots of natural light."

Place to eat near campus: "Dolores, a Mexican restaurant in Fox Point (shoutout to Mark Buckley)."