Presidential Award Caps Off Many Recognitions for John Jay Teacher

There's not a lot of sitting down in Frank Noschese's class.

Students hit bowling balls with mallets in 's hallways to grasp the laws of motion. They pull their shoes across the floor to study friction and the physics of tug-of-war, and have even pushed Noschese's car down the road to study mass and motion.

He calls this "play with a purpose," and it is this style of teaching that has attracted the attention of fellow educators, national news outlets such as The New York Times, MSNBC and USA Today.

And the White House. 

Noschese recently received the Presidential Award for Excellence, the nation's highest honor for teaching mathematics and science—and with it, a $10,000 award from the National Science Foundation and a trip to Washington, D.C. last week for an awards ceremony and several days of educational and celebratory events in Washington, DC.

And that was after being invited to speak at TEDxNYED, a spinoff of the "TED Talks" started in 1984 to bring together leaders to share ideas.

On receiving the recognition of his work, he said he was excited.

"The award recognizes that being a great science teacher isn't about being a great explainer, but is rather about fostering scientific inquiry, taking risks with new instructional methods to engage students, and continuously reflecting and sharing successes and failures with others," he said in a district press release.

On the conference, he said he was so flattered to be selected and for the opportunity to advocate for a science instruction approach he employs, called "Modeling Instruction."

"Instead of relying on textbooks and lectures, we actively engage the kids in creating and designing their own experiments to find out how the physical world works," Noschese told Patch. "We talk about what's going to happen, we come up with a question and use the students' observations to make conclusions."

Noschese said that flips the traditional way of teaching science. Instead of moving from the abstract—a scientific formula—and then applying it to different situations, he has students move from the concrete—hitting a bowling ball with a mallet—to the abstract.

"They hit the ball, draw diagrams and compare results. That's when they come up with the abstract, the equation," he said. "They see science as something they can actually do, not as something that has been handed down to them. It sticks with them much longer," he said.

His teaching position at John Jay was his first, and he's been at the school—where he's always felt supported to try new approaches, he said—for 14 years.

The recognitions have been a professional validation for his teaching style, which he modestly said has been around for a while and "done way better," by others before him—but perhaps, he admitted, not as visibly.

Noschese is active on social media as a way to connect with others and promote positive change in education.

In his TEDxNYED presentation (posted with this story) he asked educators in the room to ponder change:

"We have to ask ourselves, is science is about regurgitating facts for the exam? Or is it about creating and discovering and letting them see they can do science—the human discovery process of science is as equally important as as the scientific results."

PAEMST applications are reviewed at the state and national levels by selection committees of outstanding scientists, mathematicians, and educators.  Nominees are then sent to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and to the President for final selection. Each year the awards alternate between elementary (kindergarten through sixth grade) and secondary (seventh through 12th grade) teachers.