Year: 2020 — Province: British Columbia
Certificate of Achievement Recipient
École Glenbrook Middle School
Language arts, French immersion, library, ADST, social studies, science, resource, grades 6 to 8
New Westminster, British Columbia
Carmen is an educator that never sees the door to the hall or the school as the point where her work stops. She truly sees everyone around her as a community of learners and teachers.
When students, teachers, and parents describe Carmen Woo, similar words come up repeatedly, including empathetic, diplomatic, warm, wise, humorous and committed. She believes every student is unique and can thrive with the appropriate supports, flexibility and tools. Her Library Learning Commons is the busy, welcoming hub—and heart—of her bilingual middle school.
Teaching approach
Carmen expects students to use their strengths to support others while pushing themselves out of their own comfort zones. She helps teachers move away from peppering students with questions toward encouraging pupils to ask—and pursue answers to—their own questions.
In the classroom
- Explores democracy and how it works: helps students use the Vote Compass website to assess political platforms; organizes all-candidates' meetings and mock elections for students.
- Supports teachers and students as they try new technologies: her Library Learning Commons offers VEX Robotics, 3D printers and green screens; showed a teacher how to use Micro:bits to teach students about disease simulation; student engagement improved.
- Promotes digital literacy: teaches students to evaluate sources when doing Internet research; during an online safety workshop, a student revealed information that led to police intervention.
- Creates an inclusive environment: is the sexual orientation and gender identities lead; sponsors gender and sexualities alliance club; serves on French-language instruction committees; helps colleagues to provide STEM and literacy opportunities.
- Introduces Indigenous content: residential schools survivors share their stories with students; Indigenous facilitators show students how to create medicine wheels.
Outstanding achievements
- Worked closely with a student with writing challenges who was struggling in French immersion: arranged for adaptive technology; set up coding mentorship with high school students; he made the honour roll several times and is now in a specialized game academy.
- Runs question formulation technique workshops: helps students sift through vast quantities of information while researching; coaches them to brainstorm questions, then classify them as quick- or deep-thinking questions.
- Started a robotics club: students learn coding programs, such as Scratch, Spheros and Python, and develop leadership skills by giving public coding presentations; school's team won a district championship.
- Created a French/English peer tutoring program: secondary students earn community service hours by tutoring her pupils, who in turn help elementary children; parents and students appreciate the free tutoring and the inter-school program builds community.
Get in touch!
École Glenbrook Middle School
701 Park Crescent
New Westminster BC V3L 5C4
604-517-5940
cevans@sd40.bc.ca
https://glenbrookschool.ca/