A new team begins the year at the McCall Outdoor Science School
A new year has begun at the McCall Outdoor Science School and a new cohort of graduate students will be teaching students from across the region. These graduate students will also been taking classes to support progress in their Master’s program that will involve experiential teaching methodology, ecology and leadership. Additionally, 4 of these grads will be directly working with the NARA project in a few key functions: curriculum, assessment, professional development and web-based resources. Combined, these efforts help us reach our energy literacy goals over the course of the year.
Curriculum Support Role
One of the key things that is expected of our team is to take biofuel research and information from the NARA project and infuse it into existing lessons or generate new curricular materials related to this work as it emerges. While this could include curriculum designed for use in an environment like MOSS, there is also a great need to generate material that would work in a traditional classroom environment. This role will stay connected to project efforts, while at times searching for supplementary information that will be combined into curricular materials that are cross-referenced to current standards as well as uploaded into some of our web-based resources.
NARA Assessment Support Role
In an effort to understand how MOSS students are benefiting from energy literacy curriculum pre and post surveys are used at MOSS. Graduate students will assist in the data collection and analysis of surveys taken by MOSS K-12 students. Duties will include data entry, data cleanup and preliminary analysis. Graduate student duties will also include creating, updating or editing existing surveys for K-Graduate students as well as teachers.
Teacher Professional Development (TPD)
MOSS leads professional development experiences for middle and high school teachers including a summer workshop and a year-long mentoring experience where teachers coach teams for the Imagine Tomorrow problem-solving competition at Washington State University. The TPD scholar will assist in the logistics, planning and delivery of workshops and monthly phone calls with teachers.
Web-based Resources Support Role
Because many stakeholders and team members in this project are scattered across the Northwest, web-based resources help us share information, communicate within the project and disseminate beyond the project. This is an important function that the Education team supports and it includes several online venues:
– NARA Blog
– Knowledge Base
– EnergyLiteracyPrinciples.org
This role will utilize and generate content for the Education team efforts. This role will maintain some of our ongoing web updates (content), as well as work closely with other team members to connect new information to the web and into lesson plans.