STEMvisions Blog

Professional services has had a very busy year!

LASER i3

This year brought our Department of Education i3 (Investing In Innovation) grant to a close. While it was sad to say goodbye to such a huge long-term project, we certainly made some lasting memories and increased teaching and learning outcomes for schools in North Carolina, Northern New Mexico, and the Houston Independent School District. We held Implementation Institutes in both Houston and New Mexico that were tailored to the specific needs of the region. Then we brought leaders from all three regions together with individuals and organizations that had been involved in previous LASER programs to collaborate, share ideas, get to know one another, and of course celebrate the incredible investment that the three LASER i3 regions have made in education in their regions over the last five years.

Do you want to teach engineering in your classroom? Go for it; it’s not as hard as you might think. This is just the subject that Pamela Lottero-Purdue and I presented at the 2015 Smithsonian Science Education Forum. Throughout the day, attendees from all education backgrounds were able to see and participate in activities that bring engineering to life in any educational setting.

I spent the spring of 2012 like most soon-to-be college graduates-- trying to evaluate what life after college lectures and late night study groups actually entailed. A full-time "grown-up" job? Getting a Master's Degree (in who knows what, it's just the thing to do nowadays, right)? Or, what was rapidly becoming more of a reality, being unemployed with a liberal arts degree in my back pocket. As the question, "what do you plan on doing after you graduate?" became a daily inquiry from friends and family, I was frantically searching for anything that sparked my interest.

Recently the Professional Services Division at the SSEC sat down for the second of our new Journal Club meetings. Building off of our last discussion of the SSEC's "LASER" (Leadership and Assistance for Science Education Reform) model, we read Christopher L.

As the temperature cools and crowds slowly begin to leave our nation's capital, one thing is certain (OK, maybe two things are certain): summer is nearly over, and the SSEC's 2013 International K-12 Science Education Institute for Leadership Development and Strategic Planning has come to a close.

A culture of argumentation... at first it doesn't sound like the sort of thing you would want to encourage in the classroom.  But especially in science class, it is exactly what our students need. "Argumentation" is the backbone of how scientists talk to one another.  Similar to building a court case, scientific arguments are a way to explain what you think, and why you think that way. Unfortunately, despite argumentation's critical role in science, it is seldom used in teaching the subject.

Hi, Energy Academicians!

Welcome to our 2013 Energy SSEAT Blog. This site was created for you to network, share ideas, to keep touch after the Academy, and generally to provide a casual digital forum for us to talk energy!