Schools

It Takes an Engaged Classroom

Teacher of the Year Erin Carson uses technology, interactive exercises to reach fifth-graders at Indian Valley Elementary School.


The fifth-graders are engaged. They thrust their hands in the air, straining, so that they can be the one to demonstrate their understanding of the human digestive system … just before lunch!

The teacher of the year didn't get her award for timing.

Erin Carson, a fifth-grader teacher at Indian Valley Elementary School, was recently named the Walnut Creek School District's teacher of the year for 2012.

Carson is known for her facility with the use of computers in the classroom, and her facility with students' enthusiasm.

The students rush to the front of the classroom to lay their drawings of the esophagus — open and closed — on the projector, which shows them on the wall screen two feet above the teacher's head.

Carson calls on individual students to read short passages about the digestive system. Then they play "Two Truths and One Lie," which is a variation on the theme of the Balderdash board game. Each student writes two facts about the digestive system and one tricky lie. In their clusters of tables of three and four students, they test the facts and see what's a good lie — like the stomach using sulfuric acid (no, that's really hydrochloric acid).

Figuring out the lies is fun. No students are yawning. They're learning.

Carson has taught at Indian Valley for five years. Before that, there was a year teaching English in Japan.

Type A

She is a Type A personality. But after five years, she said, she's learned to be flexible. "I've learned to go with it." She embraces the strengths of each class. This year's is "very artistic, very into technology."

The class has 23 iPods, funded by grants Carson secured, that allow the students to make presentations to show what they've learned. The teacher will call them to the laptop at the front of the class to cable up their Ipods and show everyone their learning on the projection screen. She will, for example, call individual students to teach a lesson on dividing fractions. "We'll get some pretty clever ideas," she said.

Carson is a mentor at Indian Valley for a first-year teacher, Brittany Fogarty, who teaches a combined fourth-fifth-grade class. "We text at all hours of the night," Carson said.

Carson has a master's degree in educational technology from Azusa Pacific University. She is making plans to get a doctorate in educational technology from Pepperdine next year.

In her spare time, she's trying to come back from a knee injury to roll with the TriValley Roller Girls roller derby team.

Carson grew up in San Leandro; Anchorage, Alaska; and Pleasanton. "She was always so good with kids, whether it was babysitting or teaching ballet classes," said sister LeeAnne Jones. "But she spent a few college years as a nursing major before switching to teaching."


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