Tell your story. What's next?

• What are your most valuable takeaways from the GRREC ED experience?

  • Professional connections to very knowledgeable body of educators, thus provide support to me as we were all at different experience levels and have different strength and weaknesses.

  • Opportunities to attend professional learning sessions, I otherwise would not have.

    • Poverty PD- which really made me make sure I was focusing on my students needs before their learning needs.

    • Achievement Teams- I loved that he said it is ok to offer a pre-teach before you do a pre-assessment. This makes os much sense so the data is more accurate to what they know and not just what they remember from previous years. I have loved using this.

    • Phenomena Based Learning - This gave me many resources for my room! But also has made teaching so fun, as I get to sit back and watch my students talk, thinking, and evaluate on their own from activities provided.

  • Gained a large toolbox of resources to use in my classroom.

• How have you become a better STEM educator as a result of participating in GRREC ED and the STEMCS grant?

  • Using Data and Research practices to really drive my planning & Instruction. Many of my artifacts have focused on student data from the programs our district uses. Tying this resource into ideas from the Achievement Teams PD, has pushed me to pre teach, assess, design instruction, teach, and the reassess my students. Then provide RTI through our WIN periods and allow them to still reassess.

  • Incorporated project and problem solving activities.

  • Learning and developing many 5E models that boost student engagement and connections to content. The work in our initial Methods Endeavour course introduced me to this process, as well as provided many great examples. Then the shared drop boxes seeing others lesson gave even more ideas for my own toolbox.

• Summarize your efforts for applying professional learning and redesigning your curriculum to enhance STEM learning for ALL students.

  • Utilizing one 5E model lesson per unit I teach.

  • Inclusion of real world & project based phenomena throughout each unit for students to make discoveries and have meaningful conversations.

• Were there factors that limited your ability to implement what you described above as intended? Were there factors outside of your control that may have impacted the results?

  • Self-doubt, as in feeling inadequate and not ahead of the learning curve to implement many things.

  • Time, the planning stage of these new activities and lesson designs take time and sometimes more resources than may be currently on hand.

  • Buy-in, I felt fully supported by GRREC, my mentor, and school admin. But the planning and design is often shared with others in the department. So having that shared desire for student experiences is not always easy task.

• What are the implications to your work?

  • Increase of STEM in my classroom.

  • Use of more features with the TI-84 calculators than standard practices. With having a full class set now, we have been able to add their own data to the tables. Then use the apps to write their own quadratic equations that we once could not do. One they enter that equation back into the calculator the new table has more data points or they graphed it to find key features/vocabulary. We also put in data from heart rates and jumping jacks comparison. Students used these scatter plots and the r-value to determine if there was a strong correlation or not. We also compared data class to class, and noted differences.

  • Cross content connections as part of 5E models, increasing the student discussions.

  • Stepping out as an innovative leader in classroom ideas/models.

• What are some specific next steps for continuing or building upon your work?

  • Continue to add problem based learning & project phenomena to each unit. Maybe per skill within the units.

  • Keep using data to drive instruction and reflect on what works needs to be changed.

  • Use PLC time to share ideas and promote 5E model benefits in other courses.