STEMteachersNYC continuously seeks opportunities for teachers to grow in their profession. We understand that every educator is at a different point in their careers and has unique goals for themselves and their communities, and we aim to have this reflected in the diversity of partnerships we pursue on behalf of our members.
SageModeler
Teachers need better ways to help students use and understand data and systems! In March 2020 STEMteachersNYC began seeking out teacher-vetted, immediately accessible, free, or affordable virtual programs to enhance and support teachers pivoting to hybrid and virtual-only teaching. Juliette Guarino Berg, one of STEMteachersNYC’s senior leaders, and current Board Member shared her experiences with SageModeler, a free, innovative, online program that was not only enabling students to create dynamic models, but that also had potential as an assessment tool to show students’ thinking about such models. After co-developing and co-hosting several virtual sessions for the STEMteachersNYC community with Daniel Damelin, co-founder of SageModeler and the team at Concord Consortium, Juliette and fellow NYC science teacher Kimesha Reid-Grant joined a team of teachers from NYC and Massachusetts, for a more formalized, NSF-funded RAPID project, to both support teachers in incorporating the tool into their classrooms, while also learning from the participating teachers, how they adapted the program and how students were engaging with the program.
DataWise K12!
Co-designing Practical Data Literacy Learning Progressions for the Classroom
The DataWise K12 Project brings together the expertise, community and creativity of STEMteachersNYC, DA4All and NYSCI to open a space for data scientists and teachers to collaborate on bringing context and curriculum bridges to the DS4All Core Competencies, with the goal of bringing a K-12 practice-driven lens to turning the competencies into learning progressions and curriculum.
A collaborative project building on the NYSCI-DS4All data science core competencies framework of Concepts Practices and Perspectives, and the STEMteachersNYC model of practice-driven community learning, DataWise K12 hopes to establish the foundation of progressions in data literacy through the experiences of teachers and their students. We are grateful to the teachers who will share their data-based units, to the data scientists and tool developers who will showcase their work, and to you, for helping dig into what data literacy means in our classrooms, and how to make it accessible to our students.
SPARKS!
With the twin goals of engaging students in the dynamic research taking place in their local parks, and of bringing the STEM in Parks into classrooms, in the early spring of 2021, six teams of STEMteachersNYC teachers, from across all boroughs and from K-12 public and independent schools, partnered with six teams of researchers and educators from across NYC Parks Department divisions, to collaborate on diverse ways of integrating the outdoor, highly place-based work of NYC Parks with K-12 STEM teaching and learning. Products of the partnership will include a set of free lessons and units that support teachers and schools in bringing students outside and into their local parks, to think critically and engage as stewards with the environment around them.
Computational Thinking in the Elementary Classroom (CTEC Schools)
STEMteachersNYC is partnering with the Teacher-In-Residence CT Project of Cornell Tech’s K-12 Outreach, to build a scalable model of professional learning around their Computational Thinking curriculum. Beginning in 2021 with ‘CT Tasks’ that focus on cross curricular bridges between and embedding CT in ELA and Math, STEMteachersNYC and Cornell will work with teams of elementary grades teachers across the NYC area, through summer and school year workshops and working reunions, to co-create connection points between existing curriculum and the Tasks, and provide ongoing support for and sharing of any curricular adaptations.
Outcomes will include a year-end culminating celebration, CTLE for all participating teachers, and CTEC certification for participating schools.
This work is funded by the Robin Hood Foundation Learning and Technology Fund.
QPOP! Quantum Physics Outreach Program
STEMteachersNYC was founded by 25 physics teachers – and we continue to stay on the cutting edge of physics education! Founded by STEMteachersNYC and Physics Professor Sebastian Will of Columbia University in 2020, QPOP aims to publicize the importance of quantum physics and quantum concepts for education and job opportunities for students. This NSF-funded collaboration sponsors workshops for teachers and lectures for the general public, both online and in person.