Spotlight: Miranda Embrick, James Bowie Middle School

Miranda Emrick is a Science and STEM teacher at James Bowie Middle School in Fort Bend ISD. Before coming to her current campus, she had been the science department head since 2007 at Crockett Middle School, where she helped launch their first Robotics & Engineering course. Mrs. Embrick teaches 3 courses in Science and 3 courses in STEM. This year, her engineering students won 2nd place in Remote Control Rovers out of over 150 teams at the University of Houston Mars Rover Celebration.

In 2014, Mrs. Embrick became the campus lead in the Jason’s Project and began incorporating STEM into her science lessons. It was during this time that she noticed there was very little female participation in STEM, not just in her class, but nationally as well. She made it her mission to actively recruit female students to enter into Project Lead the Way and Robotics & Engineering courses. Through her class, Mrs. Embrick lead at all girls team to participate in a new event called Stemosphere, which involved the community of Fort Bend County and several Engineering companies, in which they won first place. Since then, Mrs. Embrick has grown the female participation in her STEM class from 10% enrollment to over 35%.

Not only does Mrs. Embrick focus on providing her students with the best education, she also assists her fellow educators to do the same. Mrs. Embrick was awarded a $5,000 grant from Fluor Engineering to develop and facilitate a workshop to train teachers how to integrate STEM into their science lessons. She now facilitates coding workshops for teachers in the district to support their summer programs.

In addition to teaching Science and STEM, Mrs. Embrick has also been actively engaged in bringing real world experiences to her students with her facilitation of the Travel Club. She has taken students to Washington DC, New York City, and California. She also took students to NASA, IFLY for lessons in flight and skydiving, and the Pleasure Pier in Galveston.

“Miranda looks at the field of education as a calling and as a life-time career, not as a job. Her passion is what fuels the desire to change the lives of students as she creates exciting rigorous lessons that both challenge and stimulate learning.”