Tier #3 STEELS Special Topics, Session A

Instructor(s): Peney E. Wright

Description of Activity: Session A includes:

Equity and Inclusion

• Engage with PA’s Equitable Practices Hub 
• Review the Smithsonian Science Education Centers Zero Barriers in STEM Education 
• Strategies for Teaching All STEM Learners
• Instructional Strategies for All STEM Classrooms

3D Assessments

• Explore the features of equitable, high quality formative and summative  assessments
• Critique sample summative assessments
• Determine “must haves” for 3D assessments

Integrating STEELS and ELA K-5

Participants provided with:

• Varied daily/weekly science and engineering scheduling options
• Sample unit plans including project-based integrated learning
• Q & A Session

Meeting the pedagogical shifts to move towards the new STEELS Standards is more than just learning the 3-Dimensions. It requires that educators engage students in frequent opportunities to talk with one another to “figure out” the phenomena and to make sense of investigations and data collected.  One framework to do this is Project/Problem-based learning, which integrates subject areas, encouraging students to use their strengths and represent their learning in multiple ways.

For 3-Dimensional Formative and Summative Assessments we “test what (and how) we teach.  Frequent formative assessments monitor changes in student’s thinking. Summative assessments have a variety of question/response types and several open-ended questions to allow students to “show what they know.”

Prerequisites:

Tier 1: At least one Tier #1 Professional Learning Session

Tier 2: Ambitious Science Teaching Sessions #1-#4

Strongly recommended:  read the National Research Council: A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts and Core Ideas(2012), free download

3D Assessment Testimonial

“I think that the transition to open-ended Science questions will enable my students to think in a way that they are not used to in Science. They are good at telling “the Why” and “the What”, but “the How” is what we need to work on. The students are familiar with finding evidence in texts for Reading class, and we do provide many opportunities for them to show what they know and tell how they know, but I need more time to learn to teach them to support their evidence in science, with more than just finding the answer to a problem or completing an experiment.”

ENGINE CoP Educator attendee, May 2023