Dates: December 5-6 with travel days on December 4th and 7th 2016.
Location: Q?rius, The Coralyn W. Whitney Science Education Center at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (http://qrius.si.edu/) Washington, D.C.
Introduction: K-12 educators and learners are a large and deserving audience for outreach activities associated with scientific projects, and are often incorporated into the statement of Broader Impacts of NSF proposals. Science is increasingly emphasized in K-12 classrooms and compliments current STEM and STEAM educational initiatives, and all successful K-12 programs must link activities to state and national science standards, for example NGSS (Next Generation Science Standards). Understanding and linking to state and national science standards is also crucial to create a relevant and useful resource. These standards provide a framework that empowers teachers to promote greater student initiative and leadership in developing research questions and inquiry and experiential learning based investigations.
Although scientists are interested in working with K-12 educators and learners as part of their educational outreach activities, not many understand how to effectively design, execute, or evaluate a successful K-12 program or how to begin and maintain a working relationship with K-12 educators and administrators. The proposed workshop will provide an opportunity for experts in both collections and education to interact, share knowledge, discuss challenges and issues, and ultimately collaborate on a best practices document that can be shared with the greater collections community.
Workshop Activities:
- Discuss the importance of science standards and strategies for incorporating them into activities and curriculum
- Discuss teaching across the curriculum
- Provide examples of successful K-12 programs related to digitized collections and related programs.
- Discuss strategies for working with K-12 (creating lessons plans, preservice teacher training, inservice teacher professional development, etc).
- Discuss how and where to share project deliverables (curricular and educational resources).
- Discuss how we can align learning objectives with the goals of ADBC/NIBA.
- Learning efficacy--best practice strategies in assessing impact.
- Best practices in promoting STEM/STEAM accessibility to diverse and marginalized groups.
- Identify barriers to the use of new technologies in connecting K-12 students with digital collections.
Goals: Workshop goals include: (1) increase awareness of multiple strategies to effectively engage with K-12 learners and educators, (2) increase understanding of educational standards, (3) increase skill at aligning learning objectives with goals of ADBC/NIBA, (3) increase awareness of issues pertaining to accessibility to diverse and marginalized groups, (4) increased awareness of how high stakes testing, and technological barriers impacts teachers ability to incorporate novel activities into the classroom.
