Washington Business Winter 2018 | Washington Business | Page 46

business backgrounder | education & workforce “It is rewarding, as a scientist, to have testimony from the teachers that I have helped them ignite their passion for science. This is the piece the teachers carry forward to their own students and that is important to me and important to enabling our society’s scientific literacy.” — Janelle Downs, Plant ecologist, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory “The real basis is to take teachers into something that is so cognitively dissonant, so challenging, that they’re hanging by their fingernails on the edge of cliff, thinking, ‘This is so hard,’ then you support them by lifting them up over the edge. The celebration at the end is so grand because it’s been so challenging,” said Meredith “Peggy” Willcuts, senior STEM education consultant in PNNL’s Office of STEM Educ