Dear Visitor and Colleague,

Thank you for your interest in our “2020 STEM for All Video Showcase”, we appreciate you and value your feedback!

Last year, we collaborated with “The Staten Island Makerspace” with the goal of educating our teacher fellows about “Maker Movement” and how to use the Makerspace in their classrooms. This year, we expanded our collaboration to “The Staten Island Greenbelt Park” with the goal of helping our fellows explore and reveal naïve conceptions and misconceptions about science embedded in their students’ knowledge and use natural phenomena present in students’ environment and community to improve science teaching in their classrooms.

We seek your feedback especially in regard to:

1. One of the biggest problems of urban living is the disconnect to nature. What are your challenges in integrating STEM projects into the natural surroundings of the students?
2. The environment is changing but the students are too young to notice. What are your challenges using STEM projects to raise students’ awareness to the changing environment in real time?
3. Sustainability. What are your challenges using STEM projects to help students understand that their choices matter?

Our work seeks to advance knowledge about what kinds of experiences, knowledge, and skills elementary school science teachers require to strengthen science instruction during the foundational primary years as well as how science-focused professional learning communities may support and sustain such improvement. Our strategy puts the teacher at the center of all that we do. With the aim of pursuing the development of educators’ capacity in ways that will affect their individual classrooms and schools, in the first three years, we supported our teaching fellows through a blended multi-component Professional Development (PD) that included a) content-based graduate level courses with an integrated STEM research/lab experience on college campus, led by STEM faculty; b) face-to-face training led by School of Education faculty, experts in the fields of teacher leadership, curriculum, and pedagogy; and c) online and face-to-face collaboration with project experts and among our fellows’ peers. With the aim of cultivating a networked leadership that can influence district-wide science instruction, in the last and upcoming two years, as leaders within their own schools, the fellows will facilitate science-focused professional development for their colleagues; by virtue of belonging to the project’s professional learning community, they will be linked to a larger association of educators committed to enhancing science education - a group that might extend outward, to encompass more elementary school participants, or upward, to connect with science educators in middle and high schools.

A very nice video for a great cause!!!! I am looking forward to further pursue our work in the natural sciences; promoting and cultivating inquiry based learning throughout our learning community!

How wonderful to see our Master Teaching Fellows' students and hear them describing their important work! We look forward to the next two years as they build the leadership skills to bring their schools and communities forward in STEM!

It is a privilege to be part of this cohort, which is truly an outstanding professional learning community. Paying special attention to naive misconceptions this year has added depth to my practice as an educator. I am confident that the research and experiences in which we have engaged will enhance our effectiveness as science teachers and leaders in our schools, districts, and beyond.

I am especially looking forward to learning strategies that will help me to deliver professional development workshops to my cohort while uncovering naive misconceptions. 

What is a (brief) example of a lesson developed by teachers based on the experience of your program? Do you  have data (even if informal at this point) on the impacts on both the teachers' learning and that of their students? Thanks!

Excellent Information. Nature heals the body and sadly that has been forgotten in the modern world. Students knowledge for the future generations is imperative and the 2020 Stem Video Showcase is a step in the right direction.

I am happy to hear that you found the video to be informative. I agree with what you said in-regards to the modern world and the future generations. Educators have to guide students in the right direction for a better future. 

Dear Ms Cavallo,

As part of the graduate course “Science Experiment Design in Elementary School” our fellows developed inquiry-based activities and projects for their classrooms that they implemented throughout the year. The average course evaluation score was 3.7 out of 4, showing high satisfaction of our fellows with the course content and applications.

As part of the graduate courses “Big Ideas of Science”, parts I and II our fellows related the concepts taught in the elementary science curriculum to science big ideas, they were involved in inquiry-based hands-on and virtual experiments, online discussions, and personal journals of their learning. Over the course of the year they created concept maps and K-12 progressions and developed research papers in which they analyzed the history of development for a particular Big Idea of science and best instructional and differentiation strategies for teaching this idea in elementary school. Last fall, the fellows examined the most common children’s naïve theories and misconceptions in Biology and their sources. They analyzed research about children’s misconceptions and develop teaching methods to refute the most widespread and enduring misconceptions held by the elementary school students using the elicit, recognize, and reconstruct framework. The online component of the course provided background information of the content for students and the in-person component allowed the fellows to explore methods of addressing the misconception.  Now our fellows continue to examine the most common children’s naïve theories and misconceptions but now in Physical, as well as Earth and Space Sciences. They use literature in addition to their own experiences with hands-on labs to uncover the potential misconceptions and consider how to incorporate best practices to address the content and reconstruct the conceptions with the development of hands-on STEM lessons.

A total of 17 field trips to Staten Island Makerspace took place between December 2018 and May 2019. The field trips involved over 300 students in grades 1-5 in 10 title I schools where our fellows are teaching. During these trips, students completed projects that fellows designed to connect STEM experiences with standards-based science curriculum. After the success with the Makerspace collaboration, we decided for the year 2019-2020 to expand our collaboration to the Staten Island Greenbelt Park and repeat the process but this time involving nature and environment unfortunately COVID-19 crisis interfered with our plans and we were forced to postpone them.

Thank you so much for having several teachers share their experiences and perspectives as part of your video! Seeing a glimpse into some of their classrooms was also very helpful!

I'd like to pick up on of the questions posed by Faiza in her initial post.

"The environment is changing but the students are too young to notice. What are your challenges using STEM projects to raise students’ awareness to the changing environment in real time?"

You raise an important point about how to help stduents' gain perspectives and understandings about changes in the environment that are longitudinal in nature and need always readily perceived in everyday experiences. I think this is where we need to bring in historical perspectives through stories, images, and data. For example, my research team on the project Writing Data Stories is currently developing a curriculum unit for middle school on climate change. Our approach is syncretic in that we aim to blend students' everyday experiences, understanding and ways of communicating with academic content and ways of supporting claims with evidence. So with climate change, we start by having students think about a place that is special to them (and why it is special) and to interview a family member about any changes they have noticed in that place over their lifetime. Becasue we are working in schools with a high population of students of immigrant families, we anticipate many different special places around the world may emerge. We also have them do internet searches to see if there are any recent climate/weather events that have happened in their place. Eventually the students look at larger datasets related to temperature and rainfall in different global locations across a large timespan.

We have not IMPLEMENTED this unit yet. And I wonder, like you, how students will develop understandings of climate change when they may not experience "change" in their daily life, but rather are experiencing impacts of such change in our climate.

ANy others want to jump in this conversation?

Congratulations to the members of this NSF program. The collaboration with the Greenbelt can lead to students/citizens that are more aware of the needs of having a more sustainable planet.

Exploring nature for our urban students is so important to raise students' awareness to the changing environment. How are makerspace project. Does the program influence the district science instruction outside of the teachers participating in the program? Are there specific protocols in place to give teachers feedback on their development of their lessons as well as the implementation of the lessons?

In our project at the Belle Isle Aquarium we're not so much focused on "greenbelts" as we are on the "waterbelt" (or I suppose we might call it the "bluebelt") of the Detroit River and the Great Lakes.  Especially, students become aware of human impact when they see our exhibit on plastics discarded into the Great Lakes.  When the fish's food webs become more like "plastic webs," students begin to see the impacts of their actions.  One of the videos we made about our project (it had to do with recruiting students and teachers to apply for small grants) suggested projects on plastics:  https://www.biaquariumstem.org/uploads/1/0/6/4/106486701/nsfgrantvideo.mp4

Jeffrey, thank you for your feedback and for sharing your video. I agree that real life experience can not be surpassed and seeing with one’s own eyes impacts at a more visceral level. The earlier we start showing more than telling the earlier the children will become aware of their own impact and the sooner they, our future, can be part of the solution.

It was a real pleasure working with you on this video Faiza. Wish I had a program like this during my school years. I agree with you that the earlier the children learn about nature, can result in a better sustainable world and future.

Great work! I can see that you are working to address many misconceptions about science. Our own work is looking at a related kind of misconception, which concerns the cultural stereotypes about 'who does STEM'.  That's the topic of our video this year. I wonder if you encounter stereotypes in your work and if your program can help kids to overcome STEM stereotypes that pervade society? Thanks again for the stimulating work.

Thanks for sharing your work promoting inquiry and addressing naïve misconceptions!

Thank you for visiting us.

It is so exciting to see the Fellows bring their excellent work in addressing misconceptions from the course into the classroom with the Greenbelt Education Program. I love to see the teachers applying their studies to the classroom and engaging in leadership to share their learning with other teachers as well.

Sounds like you had good buy-in with 10 partnering school programs, and congrats on the Greenbelt partnership.  Providing PD to make sure that the teachers feel confident in communicating the curriculum to students.  Read a lot above about leveraging misconception - s' a great way to conception.  Nice to see a focus on noticing details as tools for teachers to help students re-align trajectories.

Of the field trips in  18-19, what kind of data were you able to collect of their experiences in the Staten Island Makerspace?

Thank you Michael, I noticed many of my quiet students taking a leadership role at The Staten Island MakerSpace.  These students who in the traditional classroom, would not take risks were motivated to test their ideas and when it didn't work in the ways they predicted continued to keep trying other ideas to test their products.

It is wonderful to see students learning through experiences in the parks, and this kind of enrichment will likely lead to a lifelong appreciation of both science and our great outdoor natural and managed resources. Thank you for doing this important work!

As you already appreciate, your work is critical to the development of students' understanding of science concepts, especially those related to their/our environment. Additionally, initiatives, such as this one, are necessary to ensure that students understand and value their personal responsibilities to protect the environment. Across a number of professional fields, including my own—neuropsychology—research repeatedly demonstrates that the earlier an intervention starts the more promising the outcome. With that said, it seems highly plausible that when students are effectively taught science, including the need to protect and preserve the environment, earlier in their formal education, there is an increased likelihood that they will retain the learned knowledge, truly recognize and understand their personal roles, and actively demonstrate the needed adaptive patterns of behavior related to environmental causes and initiatives. I am excited for the expansion of this work, and I look forward to learning more about it over the next two years. Thank you for contributing to the knowledge-based of school children, as well as well-being of school children and our environment.  

This reminds me of a lot of the outdoor-school program in the Oregon public school system, and it seems like it has a similar potential to have a massive impact on the excitement and engagement of the students. Thank you for sharing this with us, it's wonderful to see experiential learning gain more traction!