Adventure Teaching

For one Mason alumna, it's not just a job—it's an adventure

By Colleen Kearney Rich, MFA '95

Nothing is lost on Laurie Sullivan, MEd '03. While most Washingtonians were suffering through the noise and the mess of the cicada invasion this spring, Sullivan was highlighting passages in the Virginia Standards for Learning and helping her fellow teachers at K.W. Barrett Elementary School in Arlington use the noisy little visitors—and their students' interest in them—to review for the annual testing.

It is this kind of innovative approach to teaching that has earned Sullivan numerous accolades, including Virginia Teacher of the Year, Arlington Educator of the Year, the Washington Post's Agnes Meyer Outstanding Teacher Award, and Mason's own Academic Excellence and Leadership Award. As the Project Discovery teacher at Barrett, she serves as a resource teacher in math, science, and technology for kindergartners through fifth-graders.

In this role, Sullivan might work with a classroom teacher on a unit about energy. This past academic year, the energy unit featured solar cars, water wheels, and windmills. “I'm here to support the teachers,” says Sullivan. “The teacher and I meet and plan the unit. Then I coteach with the classroom teacher. I always learn something new, and I enjoy seeing amazing teachers in action.”

A big part of Sullivan's teaching involves reflective practice. “Reflection is probably one of the most valuable things I learned at Mason,” she says. Ever resourceful, Sullivan even uses her 45-minute commute to reflect on the day's lessons. “I can sit there and think, 'This was the good part and here's the part that needs work.' It isn't that I'm never happy with the final product—I just never settle. I'm always striving to improve.”

Sullivan's Project Discovery classroom is an incubator for good lessons. The large room is brimming with scientific posters, computers, microscopes, snake skins, cicada shells, art supplies, radio-controlled cars, and live animals and insects. Last year, students hatched chicks, butterflies, and mealworms.

Sullivan even created a Mars landscape in the classroom for students to navigate with their own miniature Rovers, which were actually modified radio-controlled cars. “I had to keep reminding them not to step on the planet's surface,” she says, “and that they were actually many miles away. I want to connect what is going on in the real world to what students are doing in school.”

Sullivan tries out many of the experiments at home, involving her husband, Chuck, and two sons, Connor (age 10) and Jackson (age 8). In fact, the Sullivan men were responsible for the conversion of the radio-controlled cars into Mars Rovers.

Sullivan herself is no rookie when it comes to the space program. She has been to NASA's Space Camp three times. In 2000, Sullivan was chosen as one out of 16 teachers in the United States for an all-expenses-paid trip to Space Camp at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. She has also visited an ocean oil rig off Santa Barbara, a severe weather station in Oklahoma, and the rainforest in Panama—all with the hope of bringing that knowledge back to her students through the use of videos and photographs.

The rainforest trip was part of a larger ongoing commitment of Sullivan's. She also serves as a teacher advisor for National Geographic's Jason Project, which was founded by Robert Ballard, the oceanographer who located the wreck of the Titanic.

“I always try to take a step back and think how what I do will make education better,” she says. “I love teaching and I am passionate about learning.” It is this passion for learning that she passes on to her students. In return, her students have given her many gifts, including a colorful leaf, a gigantic moth, and an unusual rock that turned out to be insect larvae.

“I learned a long time ago not to say 'Ew,'” she says about the strange specimens her students bring in to share. “Now I say, 'Interesting.'”

Sullivan with President Bush at a luncheon for the teachers of the year (top) and with Barrett students in an outdoor classroom (bottom).