When the Yale Peabody Museum reopened in late March after a transformative renovation, students from the New Haven public schools were the first guests to enter its reimagined galleries.
That gesture — welcoming local schoolchildren before the doors opened to the wider public — signaled the Peabody’s renewed commitment to building a strong relationship with its home city’s school system to ensure that the museum serves its community as a unique educational resource as well as a fun place to visit.
Well ahead of the reopening, Peabody staff and the school district’s leadership had begun discussing how the revitalized museum, now with free admission for all, could better support teaching and learning in the city’s schools.
“Our work with the New Haven Public Schools [NHPS] is a true partnership,” Peabody Director David Skelly said. “We are excited to work with Superintendent Madeline Negrón and her leadership team and to learn from NHPS teachers and administrators the different ways we may be able to support the learning goals of students of all ages.”
It’s one of the great things about visiting the Peabody. The students will see the world differently when they leave.
To that end, the New Haven school district recently adopted a new science curriculum for its elementary and middle schools developed by the Smithsonian Institution that aligns with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), which guide science education in Connecticut’s public schools. The district also is adjusting its high school curriculum in accordance with the state standards.
Andrea Motto, the Peabody’s assistant director of public education and outreach, is collaborating with Robert McCain, the school district’s science supervisor, and Heather Toothaker, the district’s science coach, on integrating the museum into the school district’s science curriculum.
The idea, at least to start, is to connect field trip activities to common topics in the curriculum so that every visit specifically supports classroom learning while also exposing students to the fossils, gems and minerals, and other wonders on display, McCain said.
“Field trips should be fun, but they have to be more than that,” he said. “There has to be a learning component. We envision bringing students to the Peabody to visit specific exhibits to learn about science related to what they’re learning in the classroom. Then they can take that experience back to the classroom and continue the learning.”
Over the past month, science teachers from the school district’s high schools and middle schools have visited the Peabody for professional development sessions. During these visits the teachers have toured the galleries and brainstormed ways to tie the exhibits to the schools’ science curriculum. Principals and other administrators visited the museum during an evening session to see the potential learning opportunities for themselves.
Unanswered questions
On a recent afternoon about 60 science teachers from New Haven’s middle schools gathered in a lecture space off the Peabody’s new Central Gallery, located beside the Burke Hall of Dinosaurs. Motto welcomed them.
In a brief introductory presentation, Motto discussed the various ways the museum supports education. There’s the new K-12 teaching program the Peabody is launching in which 10 doctoral students from various scientific disciplines will lead workshops for students of all grade levels based four scientific topics: climate change and its effects, adaptation and ecosystems, geologic time, and rocks and minerals. After these classroom discussions, the graduate-student educators will lead the young students through specific galleries to further illustrate the concepts and ideas they are learning about.
It is one way to use a field trip to the Peabody to reinforce the work students and teachers are doing in their classrooms, Motto said.
“We hope to find ways to really closely align something that you are teaching with something in the museum and make that connection really clear,” she told the group.
Following the presentation, the teachers toured three galleries that potentially link to the curriculum: “A World of Change” traces the major changes in climate, land, and oceans that occurred in the tens of millions of years between the asteroid strike that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs and the appearance of humans; “Dynamic Nature,” where an assortment of animal specimens illustrate the interplay among life, the environment, and evolutionary processes that resulted in the Earth’s biological diversity; and the “Living Lab” in which live plant and animal specimens — poison dart frogs, walking-stick insects, postman butterflies, and other creatures — prompt visitors to contemplate the beauty and intricacies nature.
We hope to find ways to really closely align something that you are teaching with something in the museum and make that connection really clear.
The teachers, carrying clipboards with sheets of paper listing the units of the science curriculum, jotted down ideas for tying the exhibits to the subject matter they’ll be teaching.
Chris Norris, the Peabody’s director of public programs, met the teachers inside “A World of Change,” which is adjacent to the dinosaur hall on the museum’s first floor.
“The Age of Mammals,” a mural by artist Rudolph Zallinger depicting the plants, animals, and landscapes of western North America more than 65 million years ago, stretches across the gallery’s south wall. Like the mural, the gallery’s exhibits, many featuring mammal fossils both hulking and diminutive, present a story of life adapting to planetary change, including during the Earth’s gradual transition over tens of millions of years from a wet and tropical greenhouse climate to a drier and cooler icehouse climate.
Norris highlighted a display of Oreodont fossils as an example of the interesting questions the exhibits pose. Ancient relatives of camels, cattle, and pigs, Oreodonts prospered in North America for 44 million years as the world transformed around them — possibly becoming the planet’s most abundant large mammal — before they died off about 4 million years ago, according to the exhibit text.
“If you visited what is now the U.S. Midwest 25 million years ago, you would have encountered millions of these animals wandering around in herds like bison but probably even on a bigger scale,” Norris said. “They were fantastically successful, then went extinct … and we don’t know why. That’s the best part of it. We have ideas. We think it has to do with climate change … but we don’t know that for sure.”
The mystery of the Oreodonts’ dramatic decline can demonstrate to students that there are big unanswered scientific questions out there that they might one day resolve, he said.
The fact that so much about the natural world remains unknown is a valuable perspective that could inspire students to become more interested in science, said Kris Rhyan, who teaches fifth- and sixth-grade science at New Haven’s King/Robinson Magnet School.
Rhyan says she sees potential in tying the wider story of how a changing climate has affected life on Earth over vast stretches of time to the material she covers in her climate and weather unit. She envisioned her students participating in a workshop on the impact of climate change taught by the graduate students in the new K-12 teaching program.
“I’m excited to start tying things we’re learning in class to field trips,” she said. “I like the idea that students can spend a half hour or so in one of the museum’s classrooms learning about a specific topic and then come see exhibits related to the topic.”
Seeing the world differently
Connections between the exhibits and curriculum aren’t always obvious. When the high school teachers visited the museum, McCain was concerned the chemistry teachers would struggle with ways to tie the exhibits to their curriculum.
“But they began making connections in the mineral and gem gallery that I had never considered about the composition of minerals and applications of that,” he said. “They talked about exploring what makes a mineral specimen appear the way it does. They were finding all kinds of interesting connections. We’ll see what it blossoms into.”
I’m excited to start tying things we’re learning in class to field trips. I like the idea that students can spend a half hour or so in one of the museum’s classrooms learning about a specific topic and then come see exhibits related to the topic.
For her part, Motto is also thinking of potential connections between the school district’s Smithsonian curriculum and the Peabody. The elementary school curriculum includes assessments at the end of some units asking students to design an imaginary museum exhibit that explains a concept they have learned about.
“Instead of designing an imaginary Smithsonian exhibit, students could design a real Peabody exhibit,” she said. “We could figure out how to display them here in the museum. Maybe we host a weekend where we set up their exhibits in the Central Gallery and families can come through and see their kid’s projects. A fourth grader could come here with their family and see their work on view at a world-class museum.”
The Peabody will design activities to help teachers introduce specific concepts prior to a field trip and then follow up on what the students learned once they return to the classroom, Motto said, adding that those materials could be made available on the school district’s science website.
“Planning field trips can be exhausting,” Motto said. “We want to do whatever we can to make that process easier for teachers.”
Tying field trips to specific topics and activities ensures that students will experience something fresh and exciting with each visit, McCain said.
“They’ll want to keep coming back,” he said. “Second graders will hear what the third graders do on their field trips, and they’ll be excited for their turn.”
The museum can change the way children perceive the world by allowing them to view it through a scientific lens, McCain said.
“It’s one of the great things about visiting the Peabody,” he said. “The students will see the world differently when they leave. We want to reinforce that perspective in the classroom. That’s the ultimate goal of this collaboration. We hope it develops into something spectacular.”
