Jocelyn Encinas, teacher at Ralston School, is a 2023 winner of the Prime Minister's Award for Teaching Excellence. Only 50 educators across the country receive this honour each year.--SUBMITTED PHOTO
reporter@medicinehatnews.com
Ralston School teacher Jocelyn Encinas is a 2023 recipient of the Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence. Superintendent Reagan Weeks announced the award last week in her executive report to the Prairie Rose Public Schools board.
“I was quite honoured to be even nominated for it,” Encinas told the News. “And then to win it was pretty exciting. You have to be nominated by at least four people for the award.”
Encinas’s teaching partner, her instructional coach and trustee Patty Rooks were among those to put forward her nomination.
“It definitely exciting,” Encinas said. “I wasn’t expecting to win because I looked at previous winners and there is no way I’m that good. It was nice to be recognized with the award, and I think sometimes you don’t realize how much you do because that is my job. As a teacher, I’m just doing my job.”
As Ralston is a small school, Encinas is responsible for teaching a variety of subjects, including Grades 6-9 math and science curriculums, music for Grades 1-9 and sewing, foods and robotics option courses.
Encinas said at a small school it’s important to pull from everyone’s hidden talents, which is how she became the music teacher. She took many years of piano and voice lessons while growing up, while also enrolling in band during her school years and participating in local theatre productions.
“You have to be vey organized and have your planning because it’s lots of split classes,” stated Encinas. “Being in a small school, I don’t want the students to maybe not get to do some of the stuff that the kids in the larger schools get. You need to be organized to juggle that many different classes.
“Sometimes I have multiple experiments going on at the same time so making sure I’ve planned and am prepared for it. My big thing is I don’t want a science class where everyone is sitting there memorizing facts, that’s not what science is. The facts come from using the scientific method, which is what science actually is.
“I prefer to get the kids doing experiments and doing enquiry and those types of things that are a little more hands on where they get to see where those facts come from.”
Students in her classes recently began work on their STEM fair projects where each one gets to pick what interests them, come up with the question they want to ask and then outline the experimental design that will answer the question. The students are only at the beginning stages of their projects, which will all culminate in a large STEM fair to take place in February.
This month, her classes have been completing research on different types of cycles, such as the water cycle and nutrient cycles. Grade 7 students recently created their own ecological footprint, which involved looking at how they could use resources better or ways they could decrease their carbon footprint. The group also investigated how people used to live and what their ecological footprint would look like compared to a modern one.
LEGO Mindstorm for education is used in the robotics classes where students begin learning basic coding that will move the robot while also setting up different sensors so that it will remain in a certain area of follow a set path. Once they’ve completed the basic course, students get free reign for a self-initiated project. First, they must clear the type of project they are planning with Encinas, and then they get time to work on it and code it. Projects have included colour sorters, lots of different tanks, a catapult and hands.
It’s not all in the classroom though, with Encinas and her teaching partner getting the students out into nature a couple of weeks ago by taking them to Writing on Stone for an overnight camping trip.
For more information about the award and Encinas, go to
https://pmate-ppmee.ised-isde.canada.ca/site/pm-awards-teaching-excellence-stem/en/recipients/2023-recipient-biographies-teaching-excellence#Jocelyn-Encinas or
https://ralston.myprps.com/news/jocelyn-encinas-prime-ministers-award-recipient-1696523903457
