2021 Los Angeles Area Conference - Sessions

A Phenomenal Approach to Notebooking: Putting the Interaction into Interactive Notebooks

Make student thinking come to life with notebooks! Increase the rigor of student work—learn new strategies for organizing content and how to use templates for any science class. Take home current NGSS classroom examples to get you started.

Takeaways: 1. The how and why of science notebooks; 2. Engaging ALL students in science; and 3. Templates scaffold student learning for success.

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Presenter Materials for this Session:

STEM Teaching Tools: Resources for Justice-Centered Science Instruction

Choose which of these free resources for equitable science instruction are most relevant to your work. Then read, discuss, and plan!

Takeaways: 1. Science learning is culturally rooted, and strong instruction should take an asset-based approach to young peoples’ ways of thinking and knowing; 2. Developing more inclusive classrooms is a constant process. There are always steps educators can take to support equity, no matter where they are in their journey; and 3. These resources offer tangible next steps educators can take toward equity in their classroom, from identifying meaningful anchor phenomena (stemteachingtools.org/brief/42) to teaching biology in more gender-inclusive ways (stemteachingtools.org/brief/76) to fostering more student talk (stemteachingtools.org/brief/35).

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Tools for Justice-Centered Climate Change Teaching and Learning

Our students are already impacted by climate change. How can we teach about it in ways that help them all thrive on a damaged planet?

Takeaways: 1. Justice-centered climate science instruction is possible and needed throughout the grade span, and intersects with a variety of other ecological topics; 2. Our young people are already aware of and experiencing the effects of climate change, and educators are in a unique position to help them better understand and process this new reality; and 3. There are many resources already available to support educators in this work, even if it may sound daunting at first.

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Making Science Inquiry Work for Emergent Bilinguals

Learn how the structure of your inquiry activities can produce roadblocks for emergent bilinguals, and how shifts based on student strengths increase engagement and success.

Takeaways: 1. Good science modeling uses words and picture to make meaning. Working through multiple representations of phenomena shares similarities to translanguaging among bilinguals, resulting in a resource as opposed to a deficit approach to learning; 2. Student collaborations centered around representations, as opposed to language, are more inclusive and improve understanding for all students; and 3. Generative frameworks through chunking steps and heuristics allow for organization of understanding and context transfer.

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Inclusive Science Assessments: Supporting and Designing Equitable Formative Assessments to Build on Learners’ Interests and Knowledge

Learn how to integrate the cultural resources your students bring to class with your science teaching and learning. Come explore equity-based cultural formative assessments.

Takeaways: 1. Resources for instructional leaders and educators to support and create meaningful connections between classroom science concepts and the application of those ideas in everyday situations; 2. Discussion of the implementation of these tools and resources in dynamic school environments; and 3. The strategies presented in this workshop can be used with any curricula, at any grade level, and in all subjects of science and engineering.

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Creating and Maintaining an Equitable Science Classroom

STEM classrooms should establish a welcoming environment in which all individuals can use their cultural knowledge and practices to make sense of the world.

Takeaways: 1. A shared understanding of equity and social justice in science classrooms and STEM communities; 2. Approaches to identify and honor student-lived experiences and cultures; and 3. Challenge conventional notions of what counts as science.

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Historical Accounting of Oppression in STEM Spaces

Empowering students to make science-based decisions requires acknowledgment and dialogue around the injustices marginalized communities have endured within scientific fields.

Takeaways: 1. Develop empathy through the exploration of historical events that have accumulated generational mistrust of STEM communities; 2. Create opportunities to acknowledge and validate personal experience even when it might contradict our personal experience or larger data sets; and 3. Explore the impact of the objectivity myth perpetuated within STEM educational spaces.

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