News - WestEd/UC Berkeley
GLOBE MISSION EARTH-WEST – California Professional Development Day 2019
TEACHER PD 2019
The WestEd/UC Berkeley partnership, under the auspices of GLOBE Mission Earth, held its annual California professional development session on September 10, 2019. Nine teachers attended from six high schools and two elementary schools. Six of these were new GLOBE teachers.
The professional development session included an introduction to GLOBE and a deep-dive on student projects -- the driver of GLOBE implementation in our partnership. Teams of teachers went outside to learn the bundle of urban protocols and had the opportunity to practice taking data using the full array of instruments. The "urban protocol bundle" is particularly relevant to our teachers, since most of our schools are located in dense urban environments; implementing these protocols affords teachers the opportunity to engage students in discussions about their communities, in addition to engaging them in learning critical science practices, thereby adding meaning and interest for the students.
Elizabeth Joyner from the NASA Langley Research Center joined us in person to speak to the group about the support that NASA provides to teachers and the GLOBE program in general. Most important she helped teachers navigate mynasadata (https://mynasadata.larc.nasa.gov/) and understand how mynasadata could be incorporated into their GLOBE implementation and projects.
The focus on projects began with a review of past projects as exhibited in GLOBE posters presented at the 2019 Student Research Symposium. Teachers considered the themes and learning opportunities evident in the posters. The teachers then divided into groups and put together ideas for a project they might implement with their students. They jotted their ideas directly into project poster templates. A project rubric had been provided to the teachers to support learning, project development, and review or grading of the projects. Teachers used the rubric to further hone their project ideas, in the same way students might do. Each group then presented their posters.
It was a learning-rich day. Teachers went away feeling prepared to do GLOBE in their classrooms.
type: globe-newsNews origin: WestEd/UC Berkeley