This Summer, as part of the Math and Science Grant Program between School District 51 and Mesa State, I was part of a team of teachers who went to Summer School! Yup, two straight weeks of learning the most up and coming information in the science and tech worlds! For the fourth and final year, I helped to lead the teacher leader portion of the program along with other Master Teacher, Mike Warner from East Middle School. The morning portion of the class we found ourselves in the lectures and labs of Dr. Kyle McQuade, Professor of Microbiology. For the microbiology class, we debated the “Philosophy of Science” and took a look at how students think about science education. Another debate among teachers was the idea of THE scientific method. We came to the consensus that there is not A scientific method but rather a process which those is science utilize, which seems not to be a step-by-step process, but rather a web of steps to investigating our world’s largest (and smallest) ideas. We finished the week by spending some time in the labs of Mesa State doing experiments like Extracting DNA from a pea, touring Mesa State’s microbiology labs, and using the $200,000 microscope to look at some of the smallest parts within a single cell!
For the Technology portion of the course, I, along with Mike, led teachers in a “Bootcamp Style” tech week with their brand new i-Pads, courtesy of the funding from the grant. We found literally thousands of apps which can be used in the classroom! Teachers finished their “Technology Bootcamp” by presenting their learning plans for integrating what they learned within the college course and the tech bootcamp and how this learning in summer school would impact their classroom teaching and student learning.