JESSE MAINE M.Ed.
Director of Curriculum, Instruction & Assessment
STEM Program
During my three years at the Northwest Tri-county Intermediate Unit I worked under a Math and Science Partnership Grant in which I carried out the research investigating how targeted high level professional development can effect student achievement. I worked collaboratively with the grant team and 40 selected teachers throughout a three year period. I planned, coordinated and facilitated one-on-one monthly meetings, newsletters, bimonthly group networking sessions, and annual Math and Science Summer institutes. As an Instructional Coach I assisted teachers in the development of school programs, curriculum, and school events.
Math & Science Summer Institutes
As a STEM Instructional Coach at the Northwest Tri-County Intermediate Unit I scheduled, planned, coordinated, and facilitated a summer institute each year. The events at the Summer Institute lasted for two weeks. Each year the focus was based on district need and local state and national trends. The goals are outlined as follows:
- To increase teacher content knowledge in areas identified where students performed the lowest (this was determined using eMetric to analyze PSSA scores related to the anchors).
- To increase the number of high quality lessons found on SAS by requiring teachers to complete lessons, units or projects using the “publish your best tool”.
- To increase teachers’ understanding of STEM through incorporating luncheons with local STEM professionals.
- To increase the teachers’ knowledge and comfort level in using technology and incorporating engineering into the classroom.
- To allow for teachers to network and share ideas and experiences related to teaching in the content area.
The first week of the event took place at PSU, The Behrend College where we spent the first half of the day learning about math and science content, and the second part of the day the teachers would create activities for their classrooms related to the content. During lunch, local businesses and organizations were invited to talk with the teachers about what they could offer their students, current job prospects, and future needs for their fields. We commissioned math and science professors from the university to teach about subjects in the identified lacking PA academic anchors. The professors were asked to model best practice while teaching these subjects and provide input to teachers on where they believe students stumble in the understanding.
The second week of the institute we provided training in the use of research-based best practices in the classroom to increase student involvement and engagement. This included, but was not limited to PLN strategies, Reading Apprenticeship strategies, and Project Based Learning strategies.
A few examples of STEM activities that took place over the last few years are The Gumball Challenge, and the Gumball Mural
In the Gumball Challenge, we invited the head of the PSU engineering K-12 outreach center to come talk to the teachers about engineering and design. The activity was led by Melanie Ford, and she split the teachers into groups of two and three. The teachers were given strict parameters for their task and a bag of materials; they were then let loose to create a gumball machine. Throughout the time the teachers were engaged in not only completing the task, but also discussing how they could place these types of activities in their classroom. This activity was very heavy in failures, but also in excitement and design. Many teachers went on to use this activity in their classrooms to start off a unit or semester; a few went on to build entire units and culminating projects from this idea using a Project Based Learning approach. This activity sparked teacher interest in how incorporating design and engineering in their math and science classrooms could engage students in the learning process.
In our culminating activity, 11,610 gumballs were assembled into a Gumball Mural that used creativity to show proportionality, spatial reasoning and coordinate pairs. This activity also incorporates design and innovation into the math and science classroom. This activity helped the teachers understand how they could place art, technology, innovation, careers and engineering into the classroom to allow students to be involved in their learning process.
This activity was led by Fronz Spohn, an Art professor at Edinboro University. He started the activity by showing the teachers all of the gumballs in tubes lined up to create a bar graph. He then split the teachers up into groups and gave the teachers the task to place the gumballs into tubes related to their instructions on their strip of paper. The teachers, facilitators and even people from here at the IU became involved in putting this mural together, without knowing what it was going to look like. After all of the tubes were complete and placed into their correct column on the wall, a detailed picture of the creator of the mathematical pi was created. Fronz went on to talk about how he came up with the idea, and the steps involved in creating this mural design before he arrived that day.
This research is currently in the process of publishing. The results for teacher content knowledge, and stratagey implementation can be found in this powerpoint (MSP IU 5 - 3 years TCK RTOP Horizon HEAT graphs.pdf or view it below.
This website is updated monthly, if you would like to follow me more closely try checking out my social networking sites for more immediate updates. Just Click Below!
