Help your students find their voice and use it to enact legitimate social and cultural change in the world. This workshop focuses on using both open-source and maker/STEM resources to empower students and supplement existing material and curriculum with innovative tools and practices meant to open up the conversation on injustices and activism.

STEP UP is a project designed to increase the representation of women in physics by supporting high school teachers to make their own classes more inclusive and encourage the growth of students’ physics identities. In this session, we will provide a brief overview of the STEP UP program and work through the Careers in Physics lesson, which can be implemented in both physical and virtual classrooms.

Everyone loves a story! In this session you will be immersed in how to use science content, social emotional learning strategies and culturally responsive strategies to teach and assess students understanding of the NGSS standards.

If you know what racism is, where it exists, how to address it, then these structures can be broken down, and equitable systems can replace what used to exist

This session will explore specific ideas and methods for math educators to foster a classroom culture where students are engaged in and feel safe discussing mistakes and misconceptions. Through a series of hands-on activities, participants will model strategies that help increase not only student proficiency but also self-confidence.

Educating in STEM goes further than a simple understanding of the physical sciences or problem solving using computers and circuits. When we teach STEM, it is becoming integral to consider the cultural context in which STEM careers and applications find themselves being used. By exploring with students the specific ways that they interact with technology every day, STEM becomes more relatable and relevant.

In this hands on workshop, participants will hear about a book “One Plastic Bag Isatou Ceesay and the Recycling Women of the Gambia written by Miranda Paul. Learn how the ladies of this small town took a problem of plastic bags being dropped and accumulating in ugly heaps by the side of the road. Participants will create a new product out of a simple bag and share with others in the session.

Let’s take a critical lens to our curriculum content, especially the history of the math that we teach. This is a moment for teachers to develop a more complex understanding of the background of the math that we teach our students, one that does not center European mathematicians or European culture. I invite us to rethink what we thought we knew, and continue a journey of unlearning and unteaching, for the benefit of our students and their future.

True collaboration is about the exchange of ideas, not necessarily sharing materials. In this session, you’ll learn how to take a problem-based approach to STEM and increase student collaboration in your virtual classrooms using the lessons and activities that you already have!

Participants will 1) encounter the basics of developing and aligning pre, exit and implementation survey questions, 2) become familiar with resources on coding responses, and 3) develop and critique summarization of findings.

In the current situation, boundaries, breaks and privacy have all disappeared and well-being has gone to the bottom of the focus list. This session aims to equip the attendees with strategies to ensure their own, colleagues and students well-being.

Simple strategies such as active breaks and designing a safe office apace can support educators in ensuring they maintain a healthy work-home balance.

Teachers will have to opportunity to see how Pivot Interactives enables authentic science investigation using interactive video online. We’ll see how students learn from a library of thousands of interactive, high-resolution videos of real events, with built-in instructions, data tables and graphs, and real-time automatic feedback. Pivot Interactives is a paid subscription service that costs $5/student per year.

The STEMCoding activities that can be used as an alternative form of assessment in the physics or physical science classroom. Each activity has physics concepts, such as Kinematics and Electromagnetism, integrated into the code for it to work. Not only the activities are reinforcing the Physics concepts, but also are providing basic coding experience to both students and teachers who may not have a computer science background or prior coding experience.

Drawing on research evidence, STEP UP is mobilizing thousands of high school physics teachers to reduce barriers and inspire young women to pursue physics degrees in college. Our lesson materials are research-driven and will help shift deep-seated cultural views about who does physics.

Join us to learn how to transform paper, tape and scissors into creative curriculum based explorations for you and your students. From marble runs to bridges to catapults to habitats and more, the possibilities are endless and use the supplies are easily accessible to all. This hands-on workshop will get you cutting, folding, connecting and building in a matter of minutes, and be ready to implement new activities when you need them.

Participants will learn skills and strategies to integrate engineering and coding into the classroom to support science, computer science, and career and technical readiness.

1. Participants will be able to describe the importance of playing fun games on zoom to build culture and support students socio-emotionally. 2. Participants will build a toolkit of fun games to use for synchronous teaching by actually playing them!

This presentation will explain the need for culturally responsive teaching (CRT) and explore why CRT should include trauma-informed pedagogy. A broader perspective of CRT should also include pedagogical best practices for social-emotional, relational, and cognitive growth.

Some of the best resources to increase inclusively within the STEM curriculum can be our own alumni. In this session, participants will hear about how Montgomery alumni focused groups have formed, informed, and contributed to the creation of lessons that are more equitable in nature. An exemplar lesson will be provided to participants, with time devoted to resource sharing.

STEM+Social Studies for language learners = Success! Come explore integrated lessons that emphasize key strategies to support teaching language and content in the classroom whether you teach online or face-to-face.

This session will introduce participants to a variety of NOAA and NASA-inspired applications for teaching meteorology, climatology, and climate justice. Participants will also learn about free opportunities to bring NOAA and NASA STEM educators into the classroom who tailor content to grade level, region, and interest. Finally, this workshop will provide information on teacher professional development opportunities through the American Meteorological Society’s Project Atmosphere.

Why does grading for equity matter? Come learn and discuss the value and impact that equitable grading practices can have on your students.

Do you find it hard to fit STEM in your class? This session simplifies STEM and makes it easy for anyone to use.

History and English classes emphasize the use of primary sources and why shouldn’t it be different for STEM classes? New research in all fields of STEM make high school science relevant for students. Help our students see why it’s important to leave school with a solid understanding of science, regardless of what their professions will be.

Teachers will examine how race has played a part in environmental science leading to less BIPOC in the environmental science field and the combat the stereotype that BIPOC don’t care about the outdoors. They will then investigate how history and science overlap and about anchoring environmental science curriculum into environmental justice to increase students critical science agency. Teachers will leave with a working document about culturally relevant education changes that they can make in their curriculum.

Are you interested in building authentic relationships with your students? Does the prospect of Virtual Teaching create feelings of anxiety as to how exactly you will do this? Let’s dive in and explore ways that authentic relationships can be fostered remotely in a REAL way AND be rooted in culturally responsive teaching and engaging for you and your students!

Strong visual presentations can make a big difference in the blended classroom. We provide a model of stepped-out video lessons that scaffold STEAM activities with cultural context and stepped-out build sessions, to give all students an opportunity to achieve success in hands-on science and engineering.

This session will focus on utilizing cultural concepts and practices around the world in designing a STEAM lesson. The session will discuss ways on how to advocate, promote, and foster cultural empathy and responsibility within the STEAM classroom through exploring various cultural practices and artifacts. The discussions will help teachers build an understanding of resources/materials that can be used to create instruments, materials and artifacts based on foreign cultures.

In this session, educators will learn how students from several New York City communities were engaged in a social justice activism program hosted by STEM Kids NYC that enabled them to analyze, navigate, and challenge social injustice issues and then bridge those issues to a computer science framework in order to build apps that illuminated those issues.

The panel will share ideas on how STEM learning can boost the language proficiency in first generation of the immigrants from various perspective; including early educators, school districts, classroom teachers and top scientists traveling for their projects into the United States.

With many students learning from home, access to materials to complete hands-on projects may not be easy. I will show you how to use local community resources and donations to provide supplies to all students, as well as the impact of using diverse guest speakers to engage students in STEM projects.

Engage students in authentic learning experiences with eco-audits. An Eco-Audit is a student-driven, problem-based learning experience where students collect and analyze data relating to energy, transportation, waste, water, food, air, and public spaces. Students use the data to design and propose a solution to the sustainability challenge illuminated with the eco-audit, and can bring their solutions to reality by applying to our Student Innovation Fund.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit American shores, elementary STEM teachers were thrust into online learning environments with little to no salient professional development around best practices in digital instruction. This session will demonstrate best practices in facilitating online professional development for elementary STEM teachers in their online professional learning communities.