During the last decade of working as a consultant one of my favorite partners to collaborate with has been Pacific Education Institute. They provide excellent free materials focused on getting students outside engaging in authentic science and engineering tasks.
There is an opportunity coming up soon to join PEI for an online workshop on Designing Field Investigations.
See information below and click HERE for the registration form. (I wish I wasn’t booked on these days so I could join in!)
Below is information from PEI:
This is a FREE workshop in three components:
Jan 11, 4pm – 6pm (ZOOM)
Asynchronous Tasks (approximately 2 hours)
Jan 25, 4pm – 6pm (ZOOM)
Participants completing all three components will receive 6 Washington State approved STEM clock hours and the opportunity to earn an implementation stipend.
In my work teaching preservice and inservice teachers about the Next Generation Science Standards I like to think that I have a certain “expertise” about the Science and Engineering Practices. But last year I realized that I had been neglecting (and making some assumptions about) the practice of Analyzing and Interpreting Data. As I started to dig in and engaged in some online learning activities about Analyzing and Interpreting Data I soon realized that my understanding of this practice was pretty shallow and that I was lacking in innovative ways of considering the practice.
One resource that I found during my learning was the website (and book) Dear Data. I immediately fell in love with the idea of the project and I could feel myself being pushed outside my comfort zone. I was seeing how collecting and representing data could be personal, fun, creative, and artistic. I was in.
Dear Data stems from a year-long project that involved two women (Giorgia and Stephanie) who lived on different parts of the globe. They decided to collect everyday data and then to represent their weekly findings visually by designing hand-made postcards. The postcards were mailed each week and then collected to form the book Dear Data. The authors also recently released a very thoughtful interactive journal titled Observe, Collect, Draw: A Visual Journal. Giorgia and Stephanie began the project and their ritual eventually became a catalyst for a friendship. See the embedded video below of the authors discussing the Dear Data project.
I’m considering having my college students immerse themselves in this type of data collection and representation. How might you use these type of data stories with your students?
I have not read the publication yet but the titles of the chapters are telling:
Why Better, More Equitable Science Education Should Be a National Priority
A Vision for Better, More Equitable Science Education
How Far Are We from This Vision for Students?
How Do We Get There?
Recommendations
This looks like a great summer read for anyone working in science (STEM) education.
Below is some text from the report:
To provide high-quality teaching and learning in science, our nation, states, and communities must reframe the way they think about students from kindergarten through college. Students do not learn best by passively soaking up bits of information and then regurgitating it through multiple-choice tests and other simple measures designed to assess factual knowledge. Rather, from the earliest ages, children and youth are actively working to make sense of the world. They are capable of asking questions, gathering data, evaluating evidence, and generating new insights, just as professional scientists do.
Currently, however, far too many students at all levels are learning science by reading about it in a textbook, sitting back and passively listening to lectures, and memorizing disconnected facts. These approaches leave many students bored and asking a question that is far too often uttered in American schools: “What does science have to do with my life?” Worse, too many students perceive science as inaccessible, as a discipline consigned to an elite few who are willing to persist in a system that uses antiquated instructional practices. Worse still, lacking role models, students of color may not consider science as a potential career. The end result is that our nation ends up retaining a few and weeding out many—a practice that results in substantial inequities and an American citizenry of science “haves” and science “have-nots” .
Call to Action for Science Education: Building Opportunity for the Future (2021, The National Academies Press)
The first draft of the NGSS Primary Evaluation of Essential Criteria for Alignment (PEEC-Alignment) is now available for review and feedback. This should be a useful tool for reviewing instructional materials and for modifying and creating instructional materials.
Click HERE to review the PEEC-Alignment document as a PDF or Word document. Then you can provide feedback HERE by July 1, 2015.
Here is a piece of text from the front matter of the document on p. 2:
First, a few words about PEEC-Alignment. The acronym is intentionally a play on words. In one sense, the evaluation is a peek, or a quick look at a program. In another sense, this document describes a peak, the highest point, principal, or most important features of NGSS-aligned programs. PEEC-Alignment is designed to achieve both of these important goals.
But when it comes to engineering design I think we need some different questions and talk moves to guide students as they are collaborating to solve problems. I haven’t found a resource on “engineering talk”… so I created this engineering talk moves document.
This is very drafty and I would love some feedback. What is missing? What is redundant? Does this document even make sense? What needs to be improved to make this document useful for K-12 teachers?
The idea is that this 1 pager would be used by a teacher to guide students’ thinking as they are in the middle of collaborative work to solve an engineering problem.
I look forward to your feedback. Click HERE to download the document.
Science for All 