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Cindy Kern: Teaching Teachers

As director of Quinnipiac University’s Science Teaching & Learning Center (QUeST-LC) and a member of its School of Education faculty, Cindy Kern of North Haven is a teacher of teachers. She shares knowledge gained from 16 years as a science teacher at Green Valley High School in her hometown of Henderson, Nevada. As a high school teacher, she received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching, the nation’s highest honor for math and science teaching.

“I teach elementary and secondary pre-service teachers how to teach science,” Cindy says of her role at Quinnipiac, which she’s held for the past three years.

She’s been passing along her knowledge of teaching to undergraduate and graduate students for the past 10 years, previously at the University of New Haven and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She earned all three of her degrees—including her PhD—at the University of Nevada.

During her three years as director of QUeST-LC, Cindy has implemented several free programs for local teachers, including Workshop Wednesday, a program for science teachers.

“I do K-12 outreach where I work with classroom teachers to improve their teaching practices in science,” says Cindy, who moved to North Haven in 2013. “Currently we have two standing workshops that we do on Wednesday nights for any high school, elementary, or middle school teacher who can attend free of charge. We present them with a research-based strategy for teaching science.”

About 35 people show up at Workshop Wednesday, including four teachers from North Haven High School and North Haven Middle School. There’s also QUeST Hangout, a four-hour block of time in which science teachers come together and work on aspects of their teaching that they want to improve.

“We also have grants and summer workshops and Saturday workshops and all kinds of fun stuff,” Cindy notes.

Part of Cindy’s focus at QUeST-LC is on how to implement the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in the classroom, the new science standards that were adopted by Connecticut in 2015. It’s something she’s helped teachers with both locally and abroad, in Egypt. In February, Cindy traveled to Cairo American College (CAC), a pre-K to 12 international American school, to offer its teachers professional development in NGSS. During the seven-day trip, she also fit in excursions with her husband, Jason, and son, Khorbin.

“When I was wasn’t working, we were sightseeing big time,” she says. “We saw a total of 19 pyramids, everything from the first pyramid to the Great Pyramids. It was just an incredible experience.”

Cindy will continue her relationship with CAC; she plans to visit again in September, October, and March of the next school year. As for how it began, “the connection is my best friend [Dorothy Knox] teaches there,” Cindy explains.

“We started teaching together in 1997 at the same high school,” Cindy says. “She was trying to figure out resources and what she could do for her teachers to help them, and then we just decided it would be nice if we created a relationship between Quinnipiac and the school, so that’s really how it blossomed.”

Though it’s not as far as Cairo, moving from Nevada to North Haven was a big change for Cindy.

“It’s like living in a different world,” she says of Connecticut. “I come from summer weather from basically the beginning of March to the end of November, and now I have four seasons and I have beautiful green trees and I have tornadoes,” she says with a laugh. “We love it here. It was a culture shock after 40 years of living in the Southwest, but I think we’ve settled in quite well.”

To learn more about Workshop Wednesday and QUeST-LC’s other programs, visit www.questlc.org.