Rothesay High Teacher Wins Award For Teaching Excellence

A learning hospital, TED-Ed talks and breakout boxes are just some of the tools used by Michelle Lang Standring to teach her students.

The biology and human physiology teacher at Rothesay High School recently won a Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence.

Standring said her approach to teaching involves giving her students authentic situations they can work through.

“I find students and people, in general, are more engaged when they are tapping into their natural inquisitiveness. If they are asking questions, if they are trying to solve a puzzle, if they are trying to solve a crime,” Standring said.

Standring said she always tells her colleagues if students start asking to do it again then you know you have something good.

Another component of Standring’s biology class is Genius Hour, which requires students to find something they are passionate about and increase their skills in some way.

“Communication skills, collaboration skills, critical-thinking skills and the third one is that it has to help our biology classroom because that’s what I always tell them. ‘We are not competing against each other. We are learning together,'” Standring said.

Standring said her teaching style has “absolutely evolved” over the 12 years she has been teaching and she tries to add something new every year.

She said school has been going well during COVID-19 with students and teachers really happy to be back in the classroom, but the way she teaches has changed.

“The Breakout Boxes have a lot of things you have to touch and kind of work through. So, it’s not that we can’t do them we just have to have more precautions. So it’s a lot of safety-first and making sure the activity we are doing is safely delivered,” Standring said.

Standring “ecstatic” to win the award and she hopes she can be a good ambassador for the Anglophone South School District where she said the teachers are very innovative and doing the best for their students as they can.