Wow! This has been an incredible journey this year! And the lessons we designed are ready for others to start implementing them in the classroom.

It has been an interesting year of deciding how best to do citizen science in the classroom, how to get students engaged and motivated to do science, and even become scientists. I have enjoyed every bit if it, thinking on how my students would respond to each of the lessons I designed for the Shark Teeth Forensics Case Study. I have also enjoyed learning about paleontology, evolution, and shark teeth, together with Kimberly and Kerrie, from our great mentor Bucky.The entire process we have been through has involved meaningful and fun experiences; experiences we want to share with other teachers, and of course, with the new KF Students Discover cohort.

We talked about students being scientists, but we teachers, have also been scientists ourselves this year. We have learned and discussed issues with other scientists, we have been at the site of study (Aurora) before developing our lessons, we have collected data, and we have analyzed that data with our students. We are getting ready to present and publish all the information gathered. What an amazing and enriching experience! We are the ones beginning to make the change on  how science is taught in the classroom, and will be sharing this with teachers around the county, around the state, and nation; even around the entire world.

I would like to see my Case Study lessons used locally in middle schools and even in high schools; to be implemented in my county (Wake), statewide, and even nationwide if possible. The case study I designed is composed of various lessons that can be all taught together in the order of the study, but can also be used in the form of isolated lessons, or can be shortened if necessary. The lessons can be implemented in science classes in middle school, even in high school science, but can also be implemented in math classes. They are appropriate lessons for studying statistics in Common Core math lessons. I would like to see many teachers implementing my lessons, modifying them based on their needs, and even see teachers become motivated to create their own new citizen science lessons for their classroom.

The way “Science” is done nowadays is changing due to our global communities. More citizen science is being done now all over the world. And we, as teachers, need to also change on “how we teach science in the classroom” to “how we do science in the classroom”.