EARTH SCIENCE EDUCATION INTO THE 21ST CENTURY: ONE TEACHER’S EXPERIENCE AS A DIG TEXAS INSTRUCTIONAL BLUEPRINT EDUCATION INTERN

The NSF-sponsored Diversity and Innovation for Geoscience (DIG) Texas Instructional Blueprint project is a collaboration between the Jackson School of Geoscience, The University of Texas at Austin, The University of Texas at El Paso, Texas A&M University, and SERC. Designed to increase accessibility and availability of credible, vetted, online resources for Earth and Space Science teachers and their students, teams of university professors and teachers created yearlong online curriculum road maps, “blueprints”, composed of individual teaching units to satisfy the needs of any national upper-level high school Earth Science course. Resources in each unit follow a storyline and are aligned with the Texas Earth and Space Science educational standards, the Earth Science Literacy Principles, and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

During the summer of 2015 I participated in the project as a member of a four-person interdisciplinary team of Education Interns (master teachers). As an Intern, I assessed selected educational resources on the basis of credibility and pedagogical suitability, and determined the appropriate placement of resources within the units. In addition I developed scaffolding notes for classroom implementation and wrote background information on topics as needed.

In this presentation I share my experience as an Education Intern and describe the process whereby a plethora of phenomenal resources became organized into 750-minute teaching units, packaged in a way that facilitates use by Earth Science educators to teach any upper-level high school Earth Science course. Website: serc.carleton.edu/dig_blueprints/index.html