
Mackenzie Mace is the IB Biology Teacher at Connecticut IB Academy (CIBA) who teaches 11th and 12th grade students. While teaching the high-level curriculum, she keeps her students engaged through real world connections and sharing her own passion for the subject.
“Mackenzie brings a lot of enthusiasm to the classroom. She is great at making relationships with the students and getting them to meet high expectations in the classroom,” said CIBA Principal Michelle Marion. “She loves it, so I think that’s why she’s really good at it.”
Marion said Ms. Mace is a team player at CIBA who stands out for the work she does outside of her classroom as well.
“She is great with other staff, pitching in where we need it, professional development. She's also a part of our WSCC (Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child) Team this year. So she's our WSCC champion and has been instrumental in introducing our new wellness clinics monthly to 11th and 12th grade students. That's been huge,” said Marion. “Any time that we need her, she's there.”
Learn more about Mackenzie Mace in the Q&A below.
How long have you been teaching at CIBA and what brought you to CIBA originally?
Mace: This is my fifth year. I was actually a student K-12 in East Hartford, so I've been here for a very long time. I did my student teaching at East Hartford High, so I've been East Hartford kind of through and through.
What does a typical day look like for you at CIBA?
Mace: I will have two or three classes, sometimes four. I teach 11th and 12th grade, so usually it's more advanced biology that is taught here. It's taught over two years, so I have the same juniors as seniors. Usually we're doing a lot of hands-on stuff, we do a lot of labs, a lot of modeling. I'm trying to, even though it's hard with the higher level, make it very NGSS (Next Generation Science Standards) based. So making it so that students are working with real world scientific phenomenon and human rights stuff as well, trying to connect science to their everyday lives through what is happening in your community. So it’s very hands on, very focused on not just memorizing the content for the exam, but also how they can apply it to their real world situations and their futures, even if they don't want to become an evolutionary biologist or a doctor.
Teaching at this higher level and loving science as much as you do, is it fun for you to be able to really dig into those topics with your students?
Mace: I think maybe it’s more fun for me than it is for them. Yeah, it goes very in-depth, especially with IB, they go super in-depth on certain things and a lot of the students, depending on what they're interested in, will really like that for certain topics and then not so much. So like for plant biology, they usually don't really care as much about the inner workings of the plants. But those students that want to become nurses, when we do our anatomy and physiology unit, they're in it. They want to know how everything works, and they're really interested in it, and they want to dig deep.
What do you like most about your job?
Mace: Even though CIBA is a smaller school and that has its challenges, I like how small it is because we are able to get into those really deep concepts a lot easier because there's some smaller class sizes.
Also the staff here is very much like a family. Because it's such a smaller staff, we know who we can turn to. We can turn to everybody for help. It's very a close-knit community. And that even translates to the students where, even though I only teach 11th and 12th grade, I know a lot of the freshmen and sophomores already, even though I've never had a class with them because it's such a small school.
What are some of the most rewarding aspects about teaching and getting to know your students so well?
Mace: We recently had an alumni panel and one of the students who just graduated last year came back. She was going to be pre-med, so she was taking biology courses in college. At the alumni panel, she told me that she changed track because she was tutoring her classmates and she was like, this is actually really fun. So she was like, ‘I'm going to become the next Ms. Mace, and I'm going to become a biology teacher instead.’ So that was really what this is all about. But also seeing those students being able to achieve their goals, even if it's outside of biology or outside of teaching, just being able to be a part of that journey for them.