HSA-Austin Annual Teacher Training Workshop: 2008
Dr. Yetkin Yildirim, director of the Engineering Education Research Center,
began the workshop by welcoming teachers to the Thompon Conference Center.
He discussed the role of the EERC's partnership with the Harmony Schools in
increasing proficiency in science, technology, engineering, and math among
Austin-area youth.
Leah Waheed led the morning session with an overview of CHAMPS, a system for
proactive classroom management developed by Dr. Randy Sprick. Waheed offered
many strategies for fostering a positive learning environment, which included
arranging the physical space of the classroom effectively, instituting consistent
attention signals, and making expectations clear. Her talk concluded with a discussion
of how to interact positively with children, suggesting that teachers should aim for a
minimum of three positive student interactions for every one criticism made.
Dr. Jill Marshall started the afternoon with a presentation on Interactive
Engagement. She led teachers in a series of activities involving cognitively guided
exploration and collaboration, showing how such practices might be beneficial for a
physics course despite their infrequent use. She also demonstrated how technology,
specifically the CPS device, might be incorporated into the classroom. Toward the
end of the session, she informed teachers about recent research on Interactive
Engagement, which indicates that these teaching practices not only improve students'
overall proficiency in physics but also close the gap between women's and men's
performance.
In the last half of the Math & Sciences afternoon session, Lupita Carmona and
Adem Ekmekci introduced teachers to Model-Eliciting Activities (MEAs). Designed
for small groups of three, these activities encourage students to take on complex
mathematical problems. Instead of a single numerical answer, these MEAs have
multiple solutions and allow students to explain, describe, and revise concepts as
they develop mathematical models that can be used to solve other problems. By
presenting students with problems that resemble real-life situations, instructors can
make course material meaningful for students.
In the first segment of the Elementary Group session, Debra Junk
introduced teachers to Cognitively Guided Instruction, a way of
teaching mathematics that emphasizes problem solving. CGI allows
students to learn math in a way that makes sense to them and
encourages modeling without explicit instruction. She prompted
teachers to make distinctions among the following concepts: knowing,
understanding, and doing mathematics. Through a series of group
activities, Junk demonstrated the benefits of a mathematics education
based not on drills and rote memory but on problem solving.
Brian Fortney's workshop examined teachers' and students' beliefs about the
sciences. He began the session by helping instructors uncover their own
assumptions about scientists, pointing out that oftentimes, both children and
adults have skewed beliefs about science-related occupations. He pointed out
that students' drawings frequently depict sensationalized images of scientists
and reveal the inaccurate belief that only men, not women, are active in the
field. Fortney also discussed the strong influence of early education on
occupational choices students make in later years. He worked with HSA teachers to identify harmful myths and suggested ways to dispel them.
Dr. Frances Monteverde led the Social Studies Group in a workshop about
civic participation and the role of democracy in education. Her talk
distinguished between two philosophical approaches to education--one in
which schools are intended to mirror dominant cultural values, and the
other which regards schools as an agent of change. The workshop became
a forum for discussion about a number of topics, including curriculum
design, the limitations of contemporary testing procedures in measuring
critical thinking abilities, and the importance of social justice in secondary
school education. She concluded the afternoon by sharing some of her own
research on instructional practices of the 1930s, mentioning a few things
that teachers might learn from the educators of earlier decades.
Click here for more pictures from each session.
Click here for a biography of each speaker.
