Photo by Erin Nelson.
Paul McEwan checks on students’ progress of owl pellet dissection with, from left, Suyog Subedi, Matthew Vo, Njambi Mwai and Braden Page during their ninth grade advanced biology class at Hoover High School.
Hoover High School’s Paul McEwan has been named Alabama’s Outstanding Biology Teacher for 2021 by the National Association of Biology Teachers.
McEwan is scheduled to receive the award at the association’s annual conference in Atlanta on Nov. 11-14.
He is in his 38th year of teaching and 16th year at Hoover High, where he teaches ninth graders and International Baccalaureate students.
McEwan, 60, has a bachelor’s degree in biology with a minor in chemistry and a master’s degree in instructional technology, both from Asbury University. He got into education by working as a tutor to help pay for college. Some of the students he tutored in science said he was good at explaining complex things in a way they could understand, he said.
McEwan likes to create situational lessons that involve real-life problems. He recently took some of his students to the Cahaba River and an adjoining creek, both of which flow near the school, and had them collect soil and water samples and over time determine what kind of bacteria is in the water by observing color changes in the water over the course of several weeks.
He also uses an “argument-driven inquiry” method of teaching that allows students to replicate the inquiry practices of real scientists, and he tries hard to be creative. He recently dressed up as a farmer and made his classroom dark with wind sounds as they learned about the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.
“I enjoy the challenge of crafting the perfect sequence of teaching and learning activities for a 50-minute class period and then watching it unfold with students,” he wrote in an essay submitted to the National Association of Biology Teachers. “Not that every biology lesson plays out as successfully in class as it did in my mind, but therein lies the creative challenge for another day!”
