ENERGY TOPICS FEATURED IN MICHIGAN TEACHING EXCELLENCE PROGRAM (MiTEP): FIELD STUDIES, SITE VISITS AND CONTENT FOR TEACHERS, GRADES 6-8

Now in its second year, the Michigan Teaching Excellence Program (MiTEP) at Michigan Tech is an NSF-funded Math-Science Partnership aimed at strengthening geoscience education in urban schools in Michigan, with two cohorts of teachers from the Grand Rapids Public Schools (GRPS) currently being served in three-year suites of professional development strategies designed to deepen Earth Science (ES) content knowledge through summer field studies, school-year pedagogy/content workshops, and a third-year capstone experience providing internship experiences for teachers in regional National Parks.

An unforeseen detour occurred following the completion of year one of the professional development activities; involuntary teacher reassignments in GRPS left a majority of the initial cohort of fifteen teachers with non-ES teaching assignments. While many are still teaching science at some level, the focus on content specific to the district’s 8^th grade ES curriculum (featuring “EarthComm”) is now valid for only a handful of teachers.

In an effort to maintain fidelity to the original grant while assuring that the content included in the workshop is valid for a majority of teachers in this first cohort, the second summer of field study includes a greater emphasis on energy. This decision was made based upon the unifying nature of energy throughout the K-12 science curriculum in GRPS. Energy sources and impacts among earth systems remains the target, but this topic has been expanded to include energy conversions and calculations which provide connections across other science domains. The State of Michigan and the City of Grand Rapids have prioritized a deeper understanding of energy topics among their citizenry, and this civic connection has also been featured in many MiTEP activities.

This talk will focus on specific energy-related classroom activities, field study sites, and connections across science disciplines and grade levels that find their roots in the geoscience domain.