Valuable work you and your team and your MTFs are doing, Amanda! The Warner School at the University of Rochester is also involved in Noyce MTF program, and we and the fellows are witnessing and experiencing the growth and engagement you mention. Thanks for sharing your work!

Hi Dave, nice to meet you here! I just checked out your MTF program, it sounds great, with some similarities to our program. If the national or regional Noyce meeting occurs, were you planning to attend? Perhaps we could have our Fellows meet and we could connect. It is nice for them to meet master teacher Fellows, because there are usually lots more UG Scholars! I see that Warner also offers an advanced certificate - we have a STEM advanced certificate that Fellows get half of the coursework through the fellowship. So interesting we are doing somewhat parallel work!  Thanks for posting and sharing!

Awesome Job Marguerita, 

Keep up the good work and striving for your students.  We love you at Palisade Prep.!!!!

Vernon

Thank you so much for your heartfelt post! I am so proud of our Fellows and not surprised at all since they are amazing professionals, but I appreciate your perspective as a colleague outside the project. This is what teaching and leading is all about!

Thank you for the kind words and the feedback! The whole project leadership team of the project has worked to make this an amazing experience for the Fellows!

I love the focus on empowering teachers to help their students be successful in STEM and see themselves as future STEM professionals. 

I'd like to follow-up on Ann's questions. I would love to know if there is a particular model for STEM integration that your project is using or if there are particular resources/approaches you use to help the teachers and students to see the different aspects of STEM as a more connected whole. 

Thanks for the questions, Ann and Hollylynne!

I encourage the Fellows presenting to share some of their lessons, but for example, one of our elementary teachers planned a whole Social Studies STEM unit for teaching Colonial America, including ELA, science and engineering that had students building and testing boats, water wheels and butter making! An example of a HS unit in math, the Fellow plans to use the current pandemic to teach students about bell curves, exponential equations, and normal curves while bringing in epidemiology and an engineering design project for students to create no-sew face masks. I love all the engaging ideas Fellows present in our courses and then use in the classroom!

In terms of measured outcomes, we are primarily focused on the teacher development - examining Fellow development of self-efficacy for teaching STEM. However, one of the metrics we will be reporting to the NSF is students' standardized testing data, which, IMO, is one step removed from the project, so is not a data source we will use as a primary focus, but rather as a piece of the descriptive picture we are building through qualitative data. Already, although we are only in year two of the project, we have begun analyzing the tremendous amount of data, including surveys, reflections, course work, focus groups and classroom observations. Preliminary analysis indicates that teachers' self-efficacy for teaching STEM is increasing, which is expected, but we are most interested in the avenues that are most important in this development. We are planning to share best practices and approaches for in-service teacher professional development for STEM teaching. The next phase of this project and research is to examine Fellows' leadership projects and teacher leadership identity.

In terms of approaches, Fellows take three courses, which are part of the College's Advanced Certificate in STEM Education. These courses focus on STEM-specific pedagogy, vertical professional learning communities (VPLC) and teacher leadership. The research team has a paper currently in publication on the use of VPLCS, on which we have presented widely in the past.

I hope I adequately addressed both of your questions, but if you have others, I am happy to explain further! Thank you for participating!

Thank you Ann and Hollylynne for your kind words and for taking the time to watch our video. I am one of the Fellows and I agree with you Hollylynne. This program has made me feel empowered and motivated to teach with a STEM approach. Since I teach 4th grade, I love to integrate Social Studies with STEM. For my Native American unit, I decided to have students work in groups and learn about different Native American regions. Throughout the unit, students practiced their research skills and wrote about their specific Native American group using Google Slides. They wrote about their everyday life, but mainly focused on the specific natural resources that were found in the region. Students were provided with a variety of resources including online books, documents, websites, and videos. After class discussions and group meetings, students designed and built a Native American home based on the region they were given. They had to think about the natural resources found in the specific area, including native animals and plants that many Native Americans relied on. It was great to see how students applied their knowledge of the regions they researched. For example, one group studied the Seminole tribe, who were located in what is now Florida. Their structure included a raised home with “palmetto leave”. They knew how to elevate the home to prevent flooding, and knew how and why to incorporate native plants. Other groups created igloos, wigwams, teepees, cliff dwellings, and longhouses. It was one of my favorite STEM projects that I worked on this year! I was able to incorporate ELA and STEM with social studies.

I loved reading about your Native American unit! Thank you so much for sharing!  I hope you will take the opportunity to think about how you can share this unit (and others created by yourself and other teachers in this project) to a wider audience.  COnsider hosting them on a website, or submitting them to journals read by teachers (like Social Studies and Young Learner)

Thank you! One of the many things I love about this program is the fact that we are providing STEM opportunities to students in under-served communities.  Every child should have access to STEM education and the doors it can open to their future!

Thank you Amanda for such a rich response. It almost seemed axiomatic to even ask such as question, so I appreciate you sharing the research base that you draw from! That is what I was interested in learning more about. Indeed, having those courageous conversations is so important. I've learned from other colleagues there are those that champion Emdin's work and not so much. I do see easy "tie-ins" with this 5C pedagogy that can "translate" for science education (or phenomena-based/inquiry-based learning) when thinking about co-teaching, co-generative dialog, and cosmopolitanism. Thank you so much for sharing your work, and I'd love to hear from students too as their time/interest permit.

Really important work! Thank you for sharing your project and its impact with us.

Thank you for the feedback and the conversation!

Hi Beth, 

Thank you so much for your post! Yes, in many ways the program is helping me. As a cohort, we are asked to reflect deeply on our practices, pedagogy, strengths and fears. When asked to create lessons, we are nudged to make them engaging, interdisciplinary and new. We are pushed outside of our comfort zones, yet scaffolded so we feel supported. Due to this, we are growing as educators. During our discussions, we are asked to reflect on what leadership means, and what this may look like as we explore our future projects. 

I'd like to reflect on your question about observations and standards mastery. During the lesson that I created for my Vertical PLC, I was brave enough to invite our head of our English Department to come observe me. I did this because I wanted feedback from someone I felt was a teacher leader. I would have never dared in the past, but I have embraced the "growth mindset" as a STEM educator that this fellowship has instilled in me. I feel like I am exceeding the expectations of my curriculum because my students are not just learning content, they are firstly experiencing and practicing 21st century skills that are seen in STEM classrooms, and secondly passing the New York State Living Environment Regents. As my lessons evolve, I witness in my students increased levels of engagement, vocabulary acquisition, sense of autonomy and risk-taking during activities, discussion, and collaboration. This program encourages us to use the 5E instructional model, creating classroom environments that foster "productive struggle", exploration and meaningful learning. Due to this, the mastery of NGSS-aligned NYS educational standards has become a journey for us and our students, while meeting the task at hand. 

Well stated Kiowa. That same rigor has been felt by Cohort 2  of which I am a proud member. My students and school colleagues benefit from the work I have done as we begin to create more authentic STEM experiences for our classrooms. So, thank you for your eloquent response.

Welcome Beth and thank you for taking the time to view our video. I am one of the fellows, and I am currently teaching 4th grade. Since I started this program, I have become more fluent in our math, science, and technology standards. This has allowed for more thoughtful lesson planning that provides rigor, but is also relevant to our curriculum. Since I am an elementary teacher, I am able to embed STEM in a variety of ways. My favorite is integrating the engineering design process into social studies and science. Students take their knowledge from a topic or unit and apply it to an engineer challenge. When students present STEM projects they practice their vocabulary, questioning, and feedback. I think this is when I see student mastery compared to traditional fact based learning mastery.

Thank you!

Thank you! We did not know about that, so we definitely will!

Thank you! I am going to email you, I think we can share some of our approaches from the Integrating Math with STEM course, which you may find useful.

Thank you for the great question. I am really excited about phase two of our project, the Fellows' in-district leadership work. We have extensive experience supporting science teacher leadership and projects through a previous grant (https://www.mercy.edu/education/specialized-pro...) and have found that model to be so valuable, we are implementing it again here, in a modified way. The capstone course that Fellows take is Leadership in STEM, where they learn about action research and participate in vertical professional learning communities. Through this course, they explore their own ideas on teacher leadership and what the literature has to say about leading from the classroom. Then they devise a leadership project to embark upon, with their district approval. We are coming up on the District Leader meeting with Fellows this month to hash that out. In addition, the grant has small pots of money available for Fellows as mini-grants to support this work. They may apply for one mini-grant a year. Fellows are supported by the project leadership through mentoring and monthly meetings of Fellows. 

We are hoping for this model to be somewhat sustainable because we have started (just a year and a half old!) a NYS Advanced Certificate in STEM Education at Mercy College - this is an add-on to a teacher certification for K-12 teachers. Teachers who come to Mercy for the certificate get the Leadership course as a capstone, so we are hoping to grow the model of leading from the classroom among more than just our grant-funded Fellows. We are currently collecting data on the certificate program to find out how it supports teachers and students.

I hope I did not go on too much, I am just really excited about where all this has led and the synergy among our efforts! I believe we are making a difference in our partner districts!  I am glad to have connected with you and your team and hope we can meet up at a Noyce event soon!