Amanda Dillingham
RET Amanda Dillingham is a 10th-12th grade Biology teacher at East Boston High School in Boston, Massachusetts. Dillingham has participated in multiple summer research programs at BU Photonics.
Summer 2018
2018 was Amanda’s fourth summer participating in the RET program. Her first year was research-focused. Her second and third year was mainly geared towards integrating engineering into her biology classrooms. And now, she has returned for more hands-on research in the labs.
Amanda worked on tissue engineering in the Chen Lab; specifically, vascular density and growing capillaries as part of the CELL-MET Engineering Research Center. She has enjoyed being a student again and actively participating in a professional laboratory setting.
Over the years, she has rewritten all of her Biology curriculum and created several design-based engineering challenges to which her students have responded well. She plans to continue these efforts next summer, reworking units with her peers in the RET program.
Summer 2016
Amanda worked in Dr. Steven Sherr’s lab on the project: Development of NGSS-MA Curriculum.
Summer 2015
RET Teacher of the Week!
Week Four:
“I was a trained researcher before I started teaching,” said Amanda Dillingham, a teacher at East Boston High School, “but not in engineering! After this (RET) program, I really want to rewrite the Biology curriculum to include an engineering component.”
Her friends joke that Amanda is a professional student; with Bachelors degree in B
iology and French, a Masters in Toxicology, a Masters in Biochemistry and a Masters of Education. Amanda has spent her entire career in Boston Public Schools.
Amanda works very hard on constantly improving the science curriculum, making it more up-to-date and more rigorous, in order to challenge her students and have them get the most out of their course work. Entering her ninth year of teaching, Amanda teaches various Biology courses including AP Biology, Biology 1-2 and even a Biotechnology elective, a new addition to East Boston High.
“I have been teaching AP Biology for the last three years, and in that time my team and I have written over six grants that have brought in about $140,000 with another $100,000 coming in the following year…I have amazing collaborators (at East Boston High) that have worked with me to write these grants. We wrote a proposal to the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center two years ago. With the money they funded, we were able to build a fully functional Biotechnology lab for our students.”
With the money they were granted, Amanda and co-workers will also be offering an AP Physics course for the first time at East Boston High School. It is clear that Amanda sees a future for her students. She works overtime to provide them with the foundation they need to succeed after high school. She explains a mentoring program in which she is a co-founder. A problem that school systems often face is a lack of mentors for their kids. Amanda thinks the solution to the problem to make them! The solution could be to start in the school itself and make the kids the mentors to each other.
“We work a lot with Brown Rudnick Charitable Foundation, and they have funded us several years in a row because we have our own outreach program. It’s a mentoring program for high school students. They partner with an 8th grade classroom and actually set up their own labs and teach it and help the 8th graders through the lab as mentors. We also have programs running in the third grade and even kindergarten classroom…It’s amazing! The high school students benefit a lot. They really grow when they become mentors. We had a huge increase this past year on kids going to four-year colleges.”
Her priority, though, is not just her current students, but her future students as well. This mentoring program bridges the gap for students moving from the eighth grade into High School for the first time. She explains that it makes the transition a lot easier on them, as they have a familiar face in the halls of their new, and often intimidating school. Amanda uses a portion of the money she receives through grants to provide extra opportunities for science exploration to middle school students, some of whom will soon become her future students.
“This year we are adding a Science Fair component. We can work with kids who are interested in the middle school. They are going to be coming once a month so that we can work with them on designing research projects, and we have a little bit of funding to help get them the supplies they need, make their projects and get them to the science fair and have them be able to compete.”
We are glad that Amanda has joined us this summer in our labs at the Boston University Photonics Center. This is an important program that begins with the teachers and ends in the minds of tomorrow’s STEM researchers.
“It’s been really transformative. I was a trained researcher before I started teaching, but not in engineering. I think I found a lot of things here that the kids would just love. It’s been an amazing program.”
Watch Amanda and her REU partner Rachel discuss their research:
Advice for future RETs?
Amanda has this advice for future RET participants: “Don’t be afraid; just do it! It may seem intimidating at first, but this is an extremely supportive environment. Every day you either successfully complete your tasks, or you learn how to improve for next time.”