ImagineIT: Phase III
Phase III: My ImagineIT Action Plan
Identifying Desired Results
My overall long-term goal for my ImagineIT project is to strengthen the home-school connection so that my students will consider STEM as a viable choice for them as they begin planning for secondary education and career planning. This is extremely important to the middle school students I teach considering STEM careers continue to be underrepresented by female and minority candidates in the United States, yet these careers are now the fastest growing and highest paying in our economy. Kids are born natural scientists, always asking questions about natural phenomena and seeking to quench the thirst of human curiosity. “Yet, research documents that by the time students reach fourth grade, a third of boys and girls have lost an interest in science. By eighth grade, almost 50 percent have lost interest or deemed it irrelevant to their education or future plans” (Murphy 2011, STEM Education--It’s Elementary). I teach at John T. McCutcheon Elementary School, where we are proud to serve a very culturally diverse student body consisting of the highest percentage of students currently residing in homeless shelters of any school in CPS. To maximize students’ full learning potential in this type of environment, it is necessary to consider the age-old African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child”. Considering the backwards design process, I realize that this project will take time to get my students there, but my plan will focus on how I can utilize all available resources in our school community this coming school year to begin to steer my incoming 6th grade students into a path towards a future in STEM.
There are several things the I plan to do to help meet this objective. I plan to start by meeting with each of my students in the presence of at least one parent or family member to introduce this objective to them and the reasons I stated above as to why it is so important. Initially, I will provide a beginning of the year pre-survey that will allow me to gauge each student’s and parent’s preconceived attitudes towards and interests in STEM as viable future post-secondary educational and career choices. During the meetings, I will use them as an opportunity to introduce to the students and parents STEM support networks and extracurricular opportunities available to our students such as our partnership with Northwestern University’s Science in Society after school Science Club. Throughout the school year, I will set up days for female and minority guest speakers to our class who are successfully engaged in STEM as college students or as a career. These class visitors will share their experiences and passion for STEM with my 6th grade students, and demonstrate the real-world connections of their work to our curricular Science units of exploring geology, meteorology, environmental science, and Energy. Lastly, as part of beginning my journey with integrating TPACK, technological, pedagogical, and content framework, I aim to increase student enthusiasm and engagement in STEM through integration of numerous applications for students to share their understandings with the greater community.
Determine Acceptable Evidence: Performances of Understanding
Keeping in mind that my overall objective in my ImagineIT Project is to strengthen the home-school connection so that more of my students will seriously consider STEM as a viable choice for their postsecondary and career paths, as our school’s only middle school teacher of STEM I realize that this transformation must begin within my classroom. My students need opportunities to engage critically within the various STEM disciplinary units of discovery mentioned above. NGSS calls for students to not just know what scientists do, but to actually practice the modes of thinking and skills of scientists along their paths to exploring the Disciplinary Core Ideas, DCI’s. I plan to provide multiple opportunities for my students to apply their understanding in both cooperative/social groups settings, and as individuals.
One example of a unit that my students will be able to provide evidence through performances of understanding involves the study of Energy. NGSS Physical Science Standard 3.D expects middle school students to understand, “Energy in chemical processes and everyday life: Sunlight is captured by plants and used in a reaction to produce sugar molecules, which can be reversed by burning those molecules to release energy.” Ways my students will demonstrate their understanding of this standard will include: performing short class theater presentations of the roles of the main reactants, products, and energy transformations involved in photosynthesis; publicly shared drawings of modeling at the molecular level of both photosynthesis and combustion of biomass as a source of energy; designing and conducting lab investigations of photosynthesis and measuring calories in foods through combustion with detailed written scientific explanations; conducting a lab investigation to produce biofuel and a creating a researched presentation evaluating the costs and benefits of biofuels as an alternative energy source to traditional fossil fuels.
My students will then be able to more easily draw connections to our explorations of geology, meteorology, astronomy, and environmental science and engineering. Another example of this ability to make connections across Science disciplines involves an NGSS Earth Science standard where my students will need to show evidence of their understanding, ESS3.D “Global climate change: Human activities affect global warming. Decisions to reduce the impact of global warming depend on understanding climate science, engineering capabilities, and social dynamics.” There are several performances here too such as: designing a model to measure the greenhouse effect; conduct lab investigations to directly measure the relationship between plants and carbon dioxide and oxygen levels and then display publicly drawn models of their findings; design, test, market, and demonstrate publicly their own alternative energy devices driven by solar, magnetic, or wind energy that can compete with traditional forms of energy such as fossil fuels. Keep in mind, that each of these units will involve integration of guest speakers who are majoring in or working in these various STEM fields. The impact of these performances on each student’s changes in perception towards choosing a future in STEM will be measured using ongoing meetings with students/parents, follow-up surveys, and tracking students’ report card grades, attendance, and standardized test scores.
Planning Learning Experience and Instruction
Context:
I teach over 120 middle school students in grades 6-8 general science at John T. McCutcheon Elementary School in Chicago’s culturally diverse Uptown neighborhood on the northeast side. The majority of our students speak English as a second language and whose families emigrated from several regions such as Central and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Central and North Africa, and Latin America. The predominant native born demographic of my students is African American. Our school is considered 100% poverty and we serve the highest percentage of students whose families currently reside in homeless shelters of any CPS school. Our homeless rate hovers between 25-30% and because of this, we also have a high student mobility rate. Most of my students come prepared and are eager to learn each day. However, due to issues surrounding high poverty such as drug abuse, domestic violence, and trauma, a higher proportion of my students receive counseling than is typical in CPS classrooms. Therefore behavior disruptions are common from time to time, sometimes requiring support from school security. My students’ families are less involved in their child’s schooling and school events than most schools who deal with less issues surrounding poverty. Based upon my prior experience, including direct interviews with my students, often times they have a difficult time seeing themselves pursuing college in their futures because they have very few examples of highly educated people in their lives away from school. Despite these issues, we are fortunate to have close to one to one I-Pad use, and several carts of classroom sets of chromebooks to borrow for classroom use. I often have more self-motivated students who come before school or stay after to use our school computers for research, word processing, and creating digital presentations. Due to budget cuts, we no longer have a designated technology instructor/manager to oversee our technology maintenance.
Content:
The STEM content I explore with my students varies by grade level, but as mentioned previously, it follows the NGSS Framework and allows my students to think and practice like actual scientists through various cooperative uses of the NGSS 8 Science & Engineering Practices. This also includes field experiences when my students get to 8th grade with various community-based STEM institutions such as Friends of Chicago River Organization, which works with my students out in the field to practice environmental science and stewardship. I feel that due to the heavy emphasis on cooperative learning that embeds real-world problem-based inquiry investigations, that eventually my students are able to demonstrate understanding of the BIG ideas and concepts. The problems that I am concerned more about include low reading abilities, especially from my students who have high mobility from living in homeless shelters over the years, and also how to guide more of my students into getting involved in extracurricular STEM opportunities that will help steer them more towards STEM beyond middle school. I feel that working more closely in partnership with my students’ families is a main key to success.
Pedagogy:
Over the past 15 years of teaching, I have grown to realize that my students respond best to learning STEM content when it is delivered in ways that involve cooperative inquiry and problem-based exploration of real-world issues. This has been further strengthened through my participation in the MSUrbanSTEM summer program as I read various readings that provided many tangible examples of how teachers make learning “stick” through presenting content in manners that allow room for deeper exploration that sometimes is flexible enough to venture into other unintended investigations. Since my main goal is to guide more of my students into pursuing STEM in their futures, I plan to embed more role-playing activities, such as what we learned through Second City, that will allow my students to demonstrate the actual thinking and work of scientists. In regards to the Energy Unit mentioned previously, I plan to use Debate as a pedagogical method where my students will take on the roles of future Chicago city planners and debate how to invest taxpayer revenue in the energy infrastructure. To strengthen my students’ technical reading of STEM literature, I will build upon my Science News Article Review project, where students select their own science news article to read, annotate, and review through their own writing (see more about this project in my “reflections” page). With the new skills I have acquired during the MSUrbanSTEM summer experience, one of the main pedagogical approaches to my ImageIT plan will be to involve new ways for my students to display their understandings and share them publicly using various modes of technology.
Technology:
The main form of technology that I plan to use the most is video. I feel that video is the best form for my students considering that one of the primary hurdles that students have is being behind their grade level peers in basic literacy skills. As stated previously, I am not referring to my diverse learner students who have diagnosed reading problems such as dyslexia, but students whose deficiencies in literacy are more attributed to high mobility rates moving from one school to another in relationship to homelessness in their families. I have always wanted to try using video as an alternative way for my students to share their ideas and understandings, and now that I have gone through the experience of creating video and sharing it out with my peers of MSUrbanSTEM, I am now confident enough to employ it as a technological tool in my classroom this year. Other technologies that I plan to use in my ImagineIT project involve various apps for students to take notes, annotate text cooperatively, and have shared written communications digitally. For more on that, please see my linked webpage called “Deep Play Group”. Along with video, I plan to have my students create digital portfolios of the progression of their STEM experiences to share with parents during our scheduled face to face meetings, which will provide further evidence of my students’ changing perceptions and attitudes towards STEM.
The STEM content I explore with my students varies by grade level, but as mentioned previously, it follows the NGSS Framework and allows my students to think and practice like actual scientists through various cooperative uses of the NGSS 8 Science & Engineering Practices. This also includes field experiences when my students get to 8th grade with various community-based STEM institutions such as Friends of Chicago River Organization, which works with my students out in the field to practice environmental science and stewardship. I feel that due to the heavy emphasis on cooperative learning that embeds real-world problem-based inquiry investigations, that eventually my students are able to demonstrate understanding of the BIG ideas and concepts. The problems that I am concerned more about include low reading abilities, especially from my students who have high mobility from living in homeless shelters over the years, and also how to guide more of my students into getting involved in extracurricular STEM opportunities that will help steer them more towards STEM beyond middle school. I feel that working more closely in partnership with my students’ families is a main key to success.
Pedagogy:
Over the past 15 years of teaching, I have grown to realize that my students respond best to learning STEM content when it is delivered in ways that involve cooperative inquiry and problem-based exploration of real-world issues. This has been further strengthened through my participation in the MSUrbanSTEM summer program as I read various readings that provided many tangible examples of how teachers make learning “stick” through presenting content in manners that allow room for deeper exploration that sometimes is flexible enough to venture into other unintended investigations. Since my main goal is to guide more of my students into pursuing STEM in their futures, I plan to embed more role-playing activities, such as what we learned through Second City, that will allow my students to demonstrate the actual thinking and work of scientists. In regards to the Energy Unit mentioned previously, I plan to use Debate as a pedagogical method where my students will take on the roles of future Chicago city planners and debate how to invest taxpayer revenue in the energy infrastructure. To strengthen my students’ technical reading of STEM literature, I will build upon my Science News Article Review project, where students select their own science news article to read, annotate, and review through their own writing (see more about this project in my “reflections” page). With the new skills I have acquired during the MSUrbanSTEM summer experience, one of the main pedagogical approaches to my ImageIT plan will be to involve new ways for my students to display their understandings and share them publicly using various modes of technology.
Technology:
The main form of technology that I plan to use the most is video. I feel that video is the best form for my students considering that one of the primary hurdles that students have is being behind their grade level peers in basic literacy skills. As stated previously, I am not referring to my diverse learner students who have diagnosed reading problems such as dyslexia, but students whose deficiencies in literacy are more attributed to high mobility rates moving from one school to another in relationship to homelessness in their families. I have always wanted to try using video as an alternative way for my students to share their ideas and understandings, and now that I have gone through the experience of creating video and sharing it out with my peers of MSUrbanSTEM, I am now confident enough to employ it as a technological tool in my classroom this year. Other technologies that I plan to use in my ImagineIT project involve various apps for students to take notes, annotate text cooperatively, and have shared written communications digitally. For more on that, please see my linked webpage called “Deep Play Group”. Along with video, I plan to have my students create digital portfolios of the progression of their STEM experiences to share with parents during our scheduled face to face meetings, which will provide further evidence of my students’ changing perceptions and attitudes towards STEM.