Use innovative video-assisted STEM activities, demonstrations, award-winning videos, and behind-the-crash-tests tours to teach the science of car crashes. Visit classroom.iihs.org for more information.

TAKEAWAYS:
Participants learn how to incorporate culminating STEM design challenges (Project Pedestrian Sensors and Egg-Carrying Paper Car Crash) into their curriculum to promote student awareness and understanding of how engineering and technology are used to build safer vehicles.

SPEAKERS:
Griff Jones (University of Florida: No City, No State), Pini Kalnite (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety Highway Loss Data Institute: Arlington, VA)

Participants will understand how to develop and effectively implement STEM curriculum units that include project based activities and performance based assessments. Participants will learn to help students answer complex questions and develop solutions for challenges and real-world problems. They will also assist students with extending and refining their acquired knowledge to routinely analyze and solve problems. By the end of this session: 1) Participants will gain a clear and coherent understanding of what a STEM PBL is and how it works. 2) Participants will be able to identify and create effective essential questions. 3) Participants will be able to identify and apply the components of a STEM PBL. 4) Understand how STEM PBL’s will impact instruction for participants and students. Agenda: What is PBL? Why is it important? How does a STEM PBL Work? How to effectively integrate journal reflections. Ways to Implement STEM PBL’s

TAKEAWAYS:
Participants will learn how to effectively implement STEM PBL’s (Project Based Learning) by integrating the components of STEM and PBL in order to grow students' capacity for creativity, fun, and back-loaded learning in a STEM context.

SPEAKERS:
Adero Carter (Clayton County Public Schools: Jonesboro, GA)

This study explored how Project MISE, an inquiry-based professional development, impacted the instructional practices of science teachers.

TAKEAWAYS:
Inquiry-based instructional practices

SPEAKERS:
Emily Jackson-Osagie (Southern University and A&M College: Baton Rouge, LA)

This session is intended to discuss the importance of formative assessment as a tool for guiding students and helping all students to make progress. A variety of formative assessment tools will be explored. Most importantly, the use of individual feedback on formative assessments will be demonstrated and we will discuss how this leads to improved metacognition and critical thinking skills for students. Attendees will see sample student work on formative assessments and accompanying sample teacher feedback. They will practice making comments of there own, in addition to discussing logistical concerns with the practice of individualized feedback.

TAKEAWAYS:
This session is intended to discuss the importance of formative assessment as a tool for guiding students and helping all students to make progress.

SPEAKERS:
Jennifer Maguire (Virginia Tech: Blacksburg, VA)

Explore connections between inquiry, project-based learning (PBL), and social-emotional learning (SEL) through a new essential practices guide. Learn strategies that build SEL skills, making PBL accessible to all students.

TAKEAWAYS:
In order to make project-based learning accessible for all students, the development of social-emotional skills must be intentionally planned and explicitly taught.

SPEAKERS:
Kristana Rogers (DoD STEM/RTI International: Research Triangle Park, NC)

Inspiration to Fruition provides any educator with a game plan on how to take an idea and available resources and create a project that enhances the student experience and skills.

TAKEAWAYS:
1. A template for designing a grassroots STEM or PBL project; 2. Top 10 tips on how to make managing the project actually manageable; and 3. Proof that trusting one's intuition to build a project based on an inspirational event can bring to fruition an amazing experience for students.

SPEAKERS:
Kelly Hartings (Indian Hill Middle School: CINCINNATI, OH), Jessica Brown (Teacher: cincinnati, OH)

Science inquiry is a powerful process and learning environment that embraces exploration and sense-making, as students question phenomena and explore real world science/STEM. Inquiry is an “attitude” that seeks understanding and continually questions how our natural world works. Student achievement, engagement, and sense-making of phenomena, increase when students are taught in an instructional environment that embraces inquiry, where students are encouraged to ask questions, gather evidence, seek answers, and formulate explanations. Speaker will discuss the many varied ways that inquiry manifests itself in the elementary STEM classroom, including ways to increase participation of ELL’s. She will actively engage participants, as she shares strategies and lesson ideas that promote inquiry, and as she demonstrates effective questioning, modeling how to guide students in their own questioning and explorations, as they gather data, formulate their explanations, and draw conclusions. Speaker will emphasize the importance of ‘testing’ the ‘known’, as well as the ‘unknown’, so students can validate their processes and thinking. Creating environments of inclusivity, collaboration, cooperation, and sharing of ideas will be emphasized. Participants will embrace the power that inquiry offers: content, strategies, process, engagement, and the desire to ask, answer, and understand scientific phenomena. This session will help teachers establish effective classroom practices, guiding students in understanding the ways scientists think and study our natural world, as teachers nurture students’ sustained curiosity and love of science/STEM. Handouts.

TAKEAWAYS:
Attendees will learn how to create STEM classroom environments that fully embrace and create the inquiry process: emphasizing explorations, the formulation of questions to guide student inquiry and their understanding of scientific phenomena, the importance of collaborative sense-making and assuring the inclusivity of ALL students, the importance of assisting ELL’s with language accessibility, and the fulfillment of learner curiosity as part of the sense-making process and as a trajectory for guiding their continual learning.

SPEAKERS:
Donna Knoell (Educational and Technology Consultant: Prairie Village, KS)

Think Tank to Shark Tank: Engineer to Entrepreneur is a free, ten-session project-based curriculum developed from a summer camp for middle school students. In the camp and curriculum, students work through developing a solution to a pain point (problem) they or loved ones interact with in life. Students develop a unique solution using the engineering design process, create a prototype, identify their potential customers, develop a business model and marketing strategy to present to local business leaders to provide guidance and support on market and opportunity realization. A facilitator or teacher may implement the curriculum in either a one-week experience with morning and afternoon sessions, a two-week experience, a ten-week after-school extra-curricular, or educators can choose elements to implement within a course throughout the academic year. The summer day camp, still in operation, runs for six hours a day for a five-day week with a break for lunch. Faculty use the curriculum to teach pre-service teachers in primary, middle, and high school to demonstrate the integration of engineering and entrepreneurship design principles into the classroom. During this interactive session, participants will gain access to this curriculum, and methods of integration into a pre-service teacher education course or program.

TAKEAWAYS:
During this interactive session, participants will gain access to this curriculum, and methods of integration into a pre-service teacher education course or program.

SPEAKERS:
Karen Plaster (The University of Akron: Akron, OH)

Participants will learn how to engage young children in STEM-focused project-based learning that encourages them to make sense of everyday phenomena. Through an inquiry-based interdisciplinary approach, even our youngest learners can pose their own questions, develop models, and plan their own investigations. During this presentation, participants will view an example early childhood STEM-focused project-based learning experience where young children are engaging in sensemaking of an everyday phenomenon. They will also explore the elements of project-based learning including how to launch a unit, engage young children in research using a variety of mediums and through field work, and organize a public exhibit of learning with their school community. Participants will brainstorm potential everyday phenomena for projects and plan activities where young children can engage in hands-on sensemaking. All attendees will leave this session with the tools they need to confidently lead an inquiry-based, STEM project that is developmentally-appropriate for young children.

TAKEAWAYS:
Participants will learn how to utilize use everyday phenomena as the focus for STEM-focused project-based learning.

SPEAKERS:
Ryan Kurada (Sonoma County Office of Education: Santa Rosa, CA)

Present culturally relevant inquiry-based teaching practices to engage all students in science learning. The interactive session will define what it means to be a culturally relevant practitioner, and how to use inquiry-based teaching practices in their science classroom. The participants will be engaged using scenarios and identification lessons that are culturally relevant inquiry-based.

TAKEAWAYS:
Participants will be able to define inquiry-based learning as culturally responsive/relevant teaching and identify characteristics of cultural competency in science teachers.

SPEAKERS:
Rochelle Darville (West St. John High School: Edgard, LA)

What first hooked you on STEM? Learn how regional and national partners are working to create “STAR” moments for students through inquiry-based PBL focused on space.

TAKEAWAYS:
Students can’t be what they can’t see. In addition to powerful inquiry-based learning experiences, deliberate, equity-focused STEM education and community reinforcement of STEM exploration are required to build the STEM ecosystem.

SPEAKERS:
Kristana Rogers (DoD STEM/RTI International: Research Triangle Park, NC), Todd Campbell (DoD STEM/RTI International: Research Triangle Park, NC), Lauren Milord (DreamUp, PBC: Washington, DC), Angela Adams (Cumberland County Schools: Fayetteville, NC)

Discover how citizen science and inquiry can shape the STEM leaders of our future! Participating in citizen science provides a unique and accessible way to facilitate student science investigations and STEM learning. Students engaged in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's citizen-science projects have been asking and answering their own questions about birds for more than a decade, conducting original experiments and observational studies. Questions range from “why do the kinds of birds we see change during the year?” to “why aren’t we seeing more birds at our school and what can we do to get more to visit?” By engaging in citizen science and investigations, students become scientists and meet NGSS Standards while exercising social and emotional learning (SEL) skills. They make observations, generate their own questions, collect data, and get access to online datasets they can query. Along the way, they collaborate with peers, learn to communicate effectively, engage in arguments from evidence, and reflect on successes and challenges. These hands-on science experiences give all students authentic opportunities to build life-long skills while meeting science standards, especially those related to developing students’ science process skills.

TAKEAWAYS:
Participants will explore free resources to scaffold citizen-science-inspired inquiry projects and discover how outdoor learning and inquiry projects can support social and emotional learning.

SPEAKERS:
Kelly Schaeffer (The Cornell Lab of Ornithology: Ithaca, NY)

Unpacking the 3-D NGSS while at the same time making science instruction engaging to students is a challenge faced by science teachers across the nation. With skillful use of phenomena-based instruction, science teachers engage students by converting what the teacher planned to teach into what the students want to learn. Culturally relevant, intellectually accessible and thought-provoking phenomena enable students to make engaging connections between the required curricula content and real-life scenarios and applications. Rather than recalling discrete facts, students apply new information and use transferable problem-solving skills to explain a natural or man-made phenomenon. Phenomenon-based science encourages students to ask questions, discover connections, and design models to make sense of what they observe. This session provides participating teachers opportunities to experience lessons in the same manner as students will. They examine a phenomenon and then ask questions, collaborate with partners and design models, and discuss digital tools that can be used to engage students in phenomenon-based learning. Teachers learn how to use questioning techniques and academic dialogue to spike discontent in the students' understanding of the phenomena, thereby, driving students to use science practices to further explore their curiosities

TAKEAWAYS:
Help teachers to develop and deploy thought-provoking phenomena that will promote student engagement, comprehension, and achievement in the sciences by transforming what the teacher planned to teach into what the students are eager to learn.

SPEAKERS:
Chidi Duru (Prince George's County Public Schools: Upper Marlboro, MD)