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Science gets a lot easier to love when it feels like it belongs to your life. From the floor of the Summer Gale Conference in Jekyll Island, Georgia, we sit down with Erika James from Style Education to talk about a practical challenge schools face every year: how do you choose a middle school science curriculum that truly fits your state, your standards, and your students?
Welcome to Spotlight for Success with the American Book Company. I'm your host, Derek Pentozi, and we're at the Summer Gale Conference in Jekyll Island, Georgia.
Today we have our special guest with us, Erica James, and she is the science impact for Style, and we're so thankful to have you here. So tell me what brings you to Gale.
absolutely. So I'm at Gale meeting with other educators and district leaders across the state because we are localizing our curriculum, our middle school science curriculum for the state of Georgia.
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so um tell me a little bit about your company.
So Style offers a complete core curriculum for middle school students, and so what we like to do is localize for the specific state that we operate in. And so we do this in terms of our standards to make sure that we are offering complete coverage of all of the standards, and we also do it in terms of the phenomena that we expose students to so that way they can actually participate in a learning experience that's relevant to them because there are things that they'll see in it that are in their state.
SPEAKER_01
Amazing. And uh tell me a little bit about your position in the company.
absolutely. So I am one of the science impact specialists, and so what I do in that role is a lot of presentations. So I'll go out to districts and uh meet with people, tell them about us and what we do. I also go into the classroom and teach demo lessons so that way uh you get the opportunity to fully see what this looks like in the classroom with your students, and I go to conferences and lots of other things. I do some professional skills.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah. And awesome. Um, how'd you get into this position?
Okay, I you know what? I so I had a science was my first love as like a kid growing up, and so when I first went to college, I went biology pre-med. Um then at the last minute I decided to change. I got into an education and I was a teacher, but I saw this opportunity and I was like, oh my gosh, I love science, I got away from it, but I wanted to go after it.
