INTEGRATED STEM
WEBINAR WITH STEM HAPPENS NETWORK
Join STEM Leadership Alliance, Kelli List Wells and special guest Roy Harris, Senior. Vice President for Professional Development of STEM Happens Network for an interactive LIVE Professional Development Webinar
In partnership with STEM Happens Network, we are offering a series of online professional development webinars.
All online and LIVE PD webinars are included with the subscription membership and subscribers can access all recorded webinars throughout the year. Non-members are welcome to register for the LIVE Webinars for $50 each or $250 for the complete series. Members and non-members earn CEU credits after completing the series.
LIVE WEBINAR Details
Now on Wednesday’s, starting April 14, 2020
Time: 3:00pm – 4:00pm EST
Duration: 1 Hour
About STEM Happens Network
STEM Happens Network provides online and on-site professional development services and coaching support to schools and school districts to help transform the implementation of an integrated STEM curriculum across the content areas to better prepare students with the skills necessary for tomorrow’s careers.
Holding sessions online via webcam will allow for rich conversation, bringing the best of the traditional sessions to an online experience. In addition, sessions will be recorded and available online to STEM Leadership Alliance members 24/7 for future reference.
Scheduled Live Professional Development Webinar Sessions for the “Integrated STEM (iSTEM)” Series
(April 14th) Notebooking – is a strategy for students to express their learning, make observations, hypotheses, and support their evidence-based writing.
Through notebooking, teachers will learn how to engage students to develop a variety of skills – listening skills, narration skills, organization skills, artistic skills, and more. The combining effect of these skills will support students to select the most important and interesting information from a study and learn how to organize the information. Some of the most influential people in history used notebooking as an effective tool to record their thoughts and notes and made some of the most critical advancements in history. This webinar will teach how notebooking can be an instrumental and critical tool in the classroom.
(April 29) The Three Dimensions of Next Generation Science Standards – Educators will explore the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) that are K–12 science content standards. The webinar will focus on NGSS and the Three-Dimensions of Science and Engineering Practices, Cross-Cutting Concepts, and Disciplinary Core Ideas. The integration of rigorous content and application reflects how science and engineering is practiced in the real world. Standards set the expectations for what students should know and be able to do. The NGSS were developed by states to improve science education for all students. This webinar will walk through understanding NGSS and incorporating it into practice.
(May 6) Understanding the difference between disciplinary literacy and literacy across the content areas – In content area reading, we use reading and writing to study/learn information, while in disciplinary reading we must ask how does literacy help us make meaning within a discipline. Content area literacy is concerned with addressing the unique content of each discipline. Texts are introduced into each subject area so students are familiar with subject-unique content. While this engages students in the topic it does not always draw connections.
Disciplinary literacy, on the other hand, is concerned with connecting reading and writing about content across subject areas and texts should be introduced to teach students how to think in different ways. The value of disciplinary literacy is it provides the ability for students to think and connect the content.
This workshop will provide educators with a deeper understanding of disciplinary literacy compared to literacy across the content areas and how to combine the approach so students learn how to draw connections. Strengthening student disciplinary literacy – the glue that allows for the sciences to mingle with the arts in a way that provides access to all learners and not just students who favor math and science.
(May 20) Anatomy of an Integrated STEM Unit across the Content Areas – Teachers will begin to develop an integrated STEM Unit of instruction by putting all of the components together. Teachers will leverage the existing curriculum, the current standards, and the alignment of literacy and math standards, as well as other resources. Teachers will use their current materials to help begin the design process. To ensure that we are allowing access to all learners, time must be spent looking at how to scaffold assessment and text so that the curriculum invites all students. Tools like the Depth of Knowledge, DOK, rubric to assess the complexity of our tasks and to “line them up” on the scale to develop rigor are used. Also, using text complexity gradient to assess the texts teachers are introducing to students – examining all aspects such as vocabulary, sentence structure, and knowledge demands. These tools, along with a mathematical task analysis guide, create equity for all learners as they bring learners in at their place of comfort, creating access for all. Planning like this requires training and working within a professional learning community to learn and practice strategies. By thinking through how to build a unit using all of these components, teachers can build their first unit of study integrating the core content areas and other shareholders understand the complexity of this work.
(June 17) Dissecting an Integrated Unit of Study Across the Content Areas – Looking at the 5E template from Rodger Bybee and designing lesson plans aligned to the integrated STEM units.
As integrated STEM units are built, teachers begin to implement lessons and use the units to learn more about what will be viable instructional tools and engaging content for students. The 5E model of planning (Bibbey) is used and time must be spent on breaking down the myth that a lesson plan is something that lasts 45 minutes (silo approach); using the 5E model and thinking beyond one class period, students will have a strong framework within which to connect core ideas. Teachers need to be exposed to model lesson plans, deconstruct them together (teachers and administrators) and during classroom walkthroughs, helping teachers create strong libraries to use resources effectively and essential skills that need to be incorporated into units and lessons. Teachers need to work vertically and be given the opportunities (along with the tools!) to visit with each other while they work is happening to provide real-time feedback on using something like the 5E model