A Summer Most Amazing

A month ago, the idea of an entire summer spent in Raleigh was hard to fathom.  We had just completed an amazing week at NCCAT and I felt it would be pretty hard to top. This week, as our Kenan Fellows summer externship drew to a close, I realized that the NCCAT experience merely scratched the surface of the fellowship. I am left with the realization that there is too much to process all at once. As friends and family members ask about my favorite or most memorable part of the summer, I find myself speechless (kind of amazing, for me).  I have so many ideas on beneficial things to bring to my students, that my mind is racing.  A teacher once posted this eecard to social media that pretty much sums it up:

I wasn’t the only one feeling this way.  Team Jaws started the last week of our internship with a myriad of ideas, but not much of a plan.  As a group, we needed to take all the ideas in our heads and narrow it down to set of lessons that met a few needs.  Our lesson needed to (1) feature math involved in analyzing data, (2) promote authentic data visualization, (3) teach students a way to take six measurements of the shark teeth that they will be finding, and (4) spark the interest and inquiry that we all felt when we were handling shark jaws and teeth ourselves.  It was this last goal that seems to be the most important and the most elusive for our plan. As we talked about in our Daily Planet presentation, we are concerned with current school structures that don’t value student creativity, critical thinking, and inquiry.  We want these lessons to value these qualities along with addressing required concepts.

The three other SD teams were facing similar challenges. Getting to see their Daily Planet presentations helped us be inspired. One added hurdle for the other teams was access to lab equipment.  Completing the lessons was pretty easy when we were in the NRC, but scaling these lessons out to classrooms around the state wouldn’t be that easy.  It was great to see how the teams handled this. Most notably, Team Dirt had found a way to exchange almost all of the lab materials needed for their research for cheap grocery store versions. This makes the lessons approachable and doable many classrooms.

The Shark Teeth Paleontology project doesn’t need a lot of technical equipment, but it does require precision measurement of tiny shark teeth. As a team, we have developed a measurement card to help. And because many schools are moving to Chromebooks and iPads, which cannot load the software to make digital measurement, we have recommended using document cameras to help with the really small teeth.  We also created a few short videos for the teachers and students to see the measurement in action.

In the end, I hope that I can bring the spirit of this project back to my classroom. My team at school will be working around a theme of citizenship this year.  The citizen science projects we will be completing are a great way to attach this theme to the science classroom.  My hope is that the personal connection our students may have with the projects will foster a sense of responsibility and stewardship along with an increased interest in STEM fields.