The NAEP study revealed that students have higher NAEP science scores if they engaged in “hands-on science activities at least once a week in class.”  Yet schools still don’t embrace this as a way to provide deeper learning experiences that prepare students for college, careers, and life.  NCTAF’s STEM Learning Studios, on the other hand, are built on sustained inquiry and solution-focused projects.  Students who learn this way become curious, thoughtful, engaged learners and creative problem solvers and are equipped with the skills they need to become successful, globally-competitive STEM professionals and entrepreneurial leaders.

A member of the NAEP governing board and a middle school science teacher, Hector Ibarra, said in the report release: “The question we need to ask is, ‘Are we creating a learning environment that truly challenges students’ skills and boosts achievement?’ ” This is a critical question; the answer is that in order to change the environment, we need a more effective STEM education workforce.  The current teaching workforce will be strengthened when accomplished educators and bright young teachers join forces with each other and will be even further improved when teams of teachers work with STEM industry partners. This combination of pedagogical and real-world expertise, such as what we see in STEM Learning Studios, is driving a transformation in the teaching and the learning environment.

While today’s NAEP report shows a very slight improvement in science scores, we are still far behind where we want to be, especially in closing the achievement gaps.  We need to move faster and with a greater sense of urgency.  We can accelerate our pace by supporting teachers, yes, but also by mobilizing STEM professionals from industry and government who are right now feeling the pinch of an insufficient and unprepared STEM workforce.  By mobilizing those professionals in teams with teachers, industry can have a direct impact on student engagement, and on the hands-on projects that lead to outcomes like higher NAEP scores, and ultimately on the development of future STEM workers.

Join us as we develop a network of STEM Learning Studio schools where teams of accomplished educators, STEM industry professionals, and tech savvy youth are teaming up to solve our country’s STEM education challenges.

Author

Tom Carroll, President, oversees NCTAF’s research, policy, and implementation projects, develops and maintains strategic partnerships, and provides thought leadership about transforming schools from teaching organizations into learning organizations.

Even during a week devoted to celebration, we cannot ignore the fact that teachers have become the scapegoats of the national dissatisfaction with education. We’ve singled them out as the problem, but we’ve not really figured out an effective way for them to be part of the solution. With all the current alarmist rhetoric about the state of public education in the United States, it appears that we have missed the educational boat that other countries are using to sail towards economic competitiveness.  This despair might lead one to believe that there is little we can do except bash our teachers more loudly and test our students more often

Anustup Nayak’s recent article in the Harvard Business Review initially appears to articulate many of the same concerns about India that dominate the discourse here in the U.S .—bad teachers who allow their students to leave school without mastery of basic concepts. But instead of bashing teachers, Nayak shows us that within these common struggles there are common strategies for change.

The main thrust of Nayak’s article is that so-called bad teachers have been blamed for causing the problem when, in reality, they are the result of a flawed system – one that does not develop and support good teaching.  He identifies several critical ingredients for good teaching, none of which require individual teachers with inhuman levels of drive to single-handedly step in and save the entire system on their own. Instead, his vision is one of collaboration, institutional support, and ongoing professional development: “What if we create a continuous teacher education program situated inside the classroom, that gets teachers to observe expert demonstrations, discern effective classroom management practices and ‘micro-teach’ lessons and finally get constructive feedback?”  This argument is just as applicable to the U.S. as it is to India.

Nayak’s ideas for teacher support resonate with NCTAF’s work in both our TLINC and Learning Studios projects. In both of these initiatives, we cultivate meaningful, goal-directed collaboration that will empower teachers to seek new content knowledge and innovative teaching strategies throughout their careers. As an organization, NCTAF believes, as Nayak suggests in his article, that good (and, eventually, great) teaching comes from schools organized for success—that is, from sustained collaboration among teachers supported by administrators—not from the heroism of a few individuals.

Just as it took teams of engineers or scientists to bring to everyday use the greatest inventions of our age, teams of teachers will be able to prepare tomorrow’s innovators if we empower them to do so. Let’s celebrate teacher appreciation week by supporting educators as professionals who work in teams to accomplish more than any individual working alone.

Author

Sofia Rivkin-Haas, Program Manager, leads the Teachers Learning in Networked Communities (TLINC) projects and contributes to NCTAF’s research and grant writing. Sofia also co-manages social media outreach and writes for the NCTAF blog, in which she regularly analyzes and responds to current trends in education research and news.

Michael Fullan describes education reform strategies in a recent interview.

In a recent video, Michael Fullan, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, offers a thoughtful, concise list of do’s and don’ts for policymakers who seek to make large-scale changes in education in the United States.

Fullan first describes commonly employed strategies that do not lead to better teaching and learning:

• Using heavy-handed external accountability as an incentive for improvement,
• Focusing on individual teacher quality instead of team development,
• Replying on technology while ignoring pedagogy, and
• Making large-scale changes in fragments instead of as a system

Fullan then describes reform methods that have been proven to elevate student achievement:

• Having a united focus on deeper learning by students,
• Investing in their teachers and the leadership within the school, by creating ”learning-working conditions” where the staff can learn from each other and teamwork is valued,
• Using data in a non-judgemental way to show a teacher’s progress or lack or progress, but with the overriding purpose of learning and growing.

The strategies that Fullan describes have demonstrated their effectiveness in many settings. If we are to improve teacher performance and foster growth in student achievement, these strategies must be instituted in every school in our nation.

Only through a supportive culture of collaboration can schools truly become functional, successful institutions. Every teacher must be granted the opportunity to teach in a school organized for success and to develop and hone their skills as a professional every day of their career.

Author

Laura Coscarelli, Program Manager, facilitates professional development and teacher collaboration for STEM Learning Studios. Laura also manages the NCTAF Learning Studios’ online communities and contributes to outreach and social media efforts.

As a representative for NCTAF's Learning Studios program, teacher Donald Belle speaks on the importance of a quality STEM education for all students.

As a partner in the 100kin10 movement, NCTAF has committed to hiring, developing, and retaining teachers in the STEM disciplines. 100kin10 has a goal of providing America’s classrooms with 100,000 excellent science, technology, engineering and math teachers over the next ten years.

In February, the partners in 100kin10 convened for a summit in Washington D.C. to discuss the urgency of STEM teaching in the U.S. and to highlight work that is already being done on this pressing issue.

To view the new highlight video of the Partner Summit click here. The video includes interviews with NCTAF President Tom Carroll and Donald Belle, science teacher and team leader of the Gwynne Park High School Learning Studio in Prince George’s County, Maryland.

To learn more about the 100kin10 movement, click here.

Author

Laura Coscarelli, Program Manager, facilitates professional development and teacher collaboration for STEM Learning Studios. Laura also manages the NCTAF Learning Studios’ online communities and contributes to outreach and social media efforts.

Since examining the issue of teacher turnover in the 2007 study The Cost of Teacher Turnover, NCTAF has been consistently focused on helping districts and states support teachers. The study found that more teachers walk out of the doors of schools that have high poverty, high minority, and/or low performing student populations. Without protected time for collaboration and ongoing professional development throughout their entire careers, teachers will continue to leave the classroom to the detriment of student, schools, and communities.

Grossman is right, we do have a choice to make – we must create schools that are organized for student and teacher success.

To learn more about how NCTAF supports teachers in the classroom, read about our Learning Studios program here.

To learn more about how NCTAF supports novice teachers in teacher preparation program, read about our TLINC program here.

Author

Laura Coscarelli, Program Manager, facilitates professional development and teacher collaboration for STEM Learning Studios. Laura also manages the NCTAF Learning Studios’ online communities and contributes to outreach and social media efforts.

“All Byron High School teachers have participated in professional learning communities since 2008, with each department meeting for at least an hour each week, so the math department already was comfortable working as a team. So, starting in January 2010, the math team got together every Monday at 6:45 a.m., tearing apart the math curriculum and rebuilding it from scratch.”

To read the full article, click here.

What bubbled to the surface for us is that our stakeholders are at different levels of understanding and comfort in using technology.  It was akin to having a classroom of 30 students, each with a different understanding of content and a preferred learning method. Knowing this, we identified the attributes of an educational platform that would work for all levels of technology learners. As the manager of multiple NCTAF grant-funded projects, including a NCTAF Grant that allowed us to identify and incentivize folks to employ an online platform, I have put my 37 years of teaching experience to work.  I worked closely with our Director of Partnerships as well as Staff Development Directors in Denver Public Schools to identify the functions and capabilities of a platform that would best meet the needs of teachers, professors and university students.

And then along came edWeb.net!  This platform provides most of the capabilities that we had identified as essential in the previous stages of our work. Even those members of our community who had been using various other platforms came together to experiment with edWeb.net and explore its Web 2.0 features. By August 2011, we had targeted 22 “early adopters” among our cohorts of teacher candidates. These individuals became edWeb Teacher Leaders at each of our Professional Development Schools (PDS).  These Teacher Leaders attended trainings about edWeb and building online community and were then asked to take what they had learned back to their Professional Development Schools to educate their teams.  Over the course of the fall 2011 semester, the PDS online communities enjoyed active participation and employed many of the functions of edWeb. However, some participants were not so eager to adopt technology.

In December, 2011 our identified edWeb teacher leaders and some faculty gathered to share stories about how the platform was being employed and how to most effectively deal with the reticence to use the technology that persisted at a few schools.  The Teacher Leaders from the fall semester trained the new Teacher Leaders for the spring 2012 semester, thus sustaining our groundwork.

There is more activity now; and with the addition of the mobile devices provided through NCTAF’s Qualcomm Wireless Reach Grant, we are going greener and communicating in ways that we had not been able to do in the past.

Recently, when a three hour Friday class was canceled due to snow, the students and faculty engaged in a three hour on line discussion instead.  Their work was accomplished without the need to make up the class.  The benefits of TLINC are continually presenting themselves as we explore and navigate this world of technology.

Co-Author

Diane Hageman became a Site Professor at the University of Colorado, Denver after 37 years of teaching at the Elementary Level as a classroom teacher and as a Literacy Specialist. Currently she manages the TLINC Grant for UCD and works with early internship pre-service teachers in the Urban Community Teacher Education Program.

Co-Author

Sofia Rivkin-Haas, Program Manager, leads the Teachers Learning in Networked Communities (TLINC) projects and contributes to NCTAF’s research and grant writing. Sofia also manages social media outreach and writes the NCTAF blog, in which she regularly analyzes and responds to current trends in education research and news.

UNM has three active online communities of student teachers along with their faculty members in edWeb.net, the professional social network geared towards educators that is used as part of the TLINC program. We are pleased that these communities draw their membership from different parts of the UNM College of Education. The first group draws its members from the Dual Licensure Program, which includes Special Education with Elementary Education. The second group includes Elementary Education students, and the third includes Secondary Education students. We believe that the collaboration encouraged by TLINC is really working because despite the fact that there are other online platforms in which students and faculty are expected to work, student teachers have begun generating their own content on edWeb.net—posing questions and starting discussions—and sharing their experiences.

In the fall of 2011, with TLINC resources and mobile devices provided through a NCTAF-Qualcomm Wireless Reach grant, the College of Education has begun to integrate TLINC’s core concept of technology-enhanced collaboration, into the College of Education as a whole. We have linked TLINC communities on edWeb.net into the College of Education’s Field Services Portal, a portal that uses an algorithm to match Student Teachers with Cooperating teachers and has over 2000 regular users across New Mexico.

The mobile devices have enabled us to examine how students are using social networking on-the-go. The students use the devices to record themselves in classroom, to connect to edWeb.net, and to gather resources. We have found that there is a greater use of tablet devices than smartphones; this may be because many students already own a personal smartphone and are reluctant to use a second device.

It is exciting to see faculty and student interactions and postings on the edWeb.net communities. UNM is committed to making sure that our students have the resources they need even after they graduate and go out into the classroom. We see great value in TLINC work as it is geared toward the success of recent graduates.

We are very happy to see our faculty and students thinking and interacting outside of structured courses. Our efforts are, we believe, beneficial not only for our students and graduates, but also to the growing research knowledge base on technology and social networking in teacher preparation and educator development.

Author

Brittany Padilla is a Professional Intern for the College of Education at the University of New Mexico. She serves as administrator for our TLINC 1.0 and 2.0 online communities and supports various other initiatives at the College of Education.

Wilde Lake students discuss factors that effect coastline erosion with a Howard County Conservancy volunteer as they examine a map of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed.

How might global warming alter coastlines and coastal regions? Last summer during a NCTAF planning session, a team of five teachers selected this question to be the center of their work with their students for the academic year. The teachers, representing science, technology, engineering, and math classes, make up the Learning Studio at Wilde Lake High School in Howard County, Maryland. The teachers work together to create student-driven inquiry-based projects around this central guiding question on climate change. With the assistance of NCTAF, the Wilde Lake Learning Studio has enhanced the traditional school structure by providing students with the opportunity to collaborate with scientific experts from their community.

Early last week Forrest Hall, a climatologist with NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center, discussed his research with students in Wilde Lake’s Learning Studios. Mr. Hall used authentic NASA data to lead a discussion on how scientists gather information on global temperature increases.

Forrest Hall from NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center discusses climate change and global warming with Wilde Lake students.

A few days later students had the opportunity to gather their own data on the effects of climate change in local environments during a trip to the Howard County Conservancy.  Melissa Bell, the Learning Studio’s team leader,  collaborated with the Conservancy’s Environmental Educator Anne Strozyk to create a program specifically tailored to the Climate Change theme that also aligns with the school district’s standard curriculum. This collaboration originated last summer during a NCTAF-led design session, when teacher-teams had an opportunity to plan their year’s projects with content experts from the Howard County community.  Students had previously visited the Conservancy in the fall when they studied the effect of erosion on local environments; they calculated slope and determined rates of erosion, applying STEM skills to real-world problems.

A student uses a GPS device to guide his group to the next research station.

During this week’s trip, Melissa and Anne created a geocache trail for students that featured research stations spread out across the entire nature preserve.Once students successfully reached a station, they conducted investigations on renewable and nonrenewable energy sources and how they relate to climate change. The research stations were led by community volunteers, including several retired Howard County teachers, who were able to continue working with students in non-classroom settings as a result of this Learning Studio event.

After successfully navigating their way to one research station, students find evidence of previous local weather conditions in tree rings. They discussed how the Earth's changing climate could effect tree growth in the future.

Students worked in teams of four and shared responsibilities for tasks such as GPS navigation and data collection; it was many students’ first exposure to GPS technology in an educational setting. In short, the day’s featured many opportunities for students to demonstrate the 21st Century skills of collaboration, technological literacy, and critical thinking. The event was also an outstanding example of teachers working together to leverage community resources — such as STEM experts and retirees —  to enhance the educational opportunities for students.

Author

Laura Coscarelli, Program Manager, facilitates professional development and teacher collaboration for STEM Learning Studios. Laura also manages the NCTAF Learning Studios’ online communities and contributes to outreach and social media efforts.

A DuVal High School student presents his work on the relationship between fruit and vegetable pH levels and electrical voltage. Eric Brown de Coulston and Trena Ferrell, representing NASA-Goddard, inquired about his methods and next steps; the student hopes to someday power a car with organic material.

A student explains his design of a hydraulic arm to teacher Wesley Griffin. The student's project connected engineering and design principles surrounding oil extraction to the team's theme of "humans effect on natural resources."

What if every student had the opportunity to defend their work to a real NASA scientist? DuVal High School students had that exact opportunity this Thursday during a day-long STEM event organized by a team of teachers as part of NCTAF’s Learning Studios program. DuVal’s Learning Studio consists of five teachers who teach grades 9-12  and across multiple STEM disciplines. The teachers in Prince George’s County, Maryland have been working throughout this year to coordinate their respective curricula for the year around the question: How do humans use and effect the Earth’s natural resources? The teachers collaborate with NASA scientists from Goddard Space Flight Center, located just down the street, to support their work with authentic data and resources.

A group of students created a video capturing the design process when they created a water-conserving device for sinks. The student team demonstrated 21st Century skills of collaboration, creativity, and technological literacy.

Today’s STEM Assembly put a 21st Century spin on the tradational, factory-era school day structure: about 80 students from grade 9-12 gathered in the media center for a day of presentations.  Students had the opportunity to teach each other about the challenges they encountered during scientific inquiry and design processes, highlighting the overlap in skills between science, technology, engineering, and math. The event was an excellent example teachers acting as guides to provide greater student voice in the learning process.

Announcements for the event featured STEM careers that students hope to pursue.

Students defended their work in front of their peers as well as representatives from NASA Goddard – Eric Brown de Coulston, Earth and Science Public Engagement Coordinator, and Trena Ferrell, Educational Specialist. The NASA content experts did not simply drop-in for the day: with the assistance of NCTAF, the DuVal Learning Studios teachers have been working alongside NASA scientists for the last three years. This STEM event demonstrated the powerful learning gains that can happen when between students, teachers, and community content experts team-up.

When students completed their presentations they had the opportunity to work with Izolda Trahktenberg, NASA Educational Consultant; together they created models of clouds and discussed the impact of human material on weather systems.

Author

Laura Coscarelli, Program Manager, facilitates professional development and teacher collaboration for STEM Learning Studios. Laura also manages the NCTAF Learning Studios’ online communities and contributes to outreach and social media efforts.