Students take ownership while working in the cycle of Obtain, Evaluate, and Communicate Information. Teachers are a facilitator, a helpful guide to support students in their sensemaking journey. While students are working independently or in groups, they may get to points where they need the support of their teacher. However, how can students get the teacher’s attention without causing a disturbance? By using everyday items like popsicle sticks, construction paper or plastic cups, this strategy called Red Light, Green Light is a way students can non-verbally communicate with their teacher about where they are at in their sensemaking journey and if they need help. A variation to this strategy is adding a yellow light. This low-risk strategy can be used by all students including students who are multilingual learners and/or students with disabilities. Teachers benefit by providing a method to informally assess their students; thus, providing immediate feedback and support.

TAKEAWAYS:
Attendees will learn about an informal formative assessment strategy to quickly gauge their students’ confidence level during the sensemaking process.

SPEAKERS:
Laura Canepa-Redondo (Science/ESOL Program Specialist)

Are you interested in how to integrate literacy and science? Join this team of educators as they share strategies and resources for using science-focused texts in the secondary classroom. Read Alouds: Developing Literacy and Thinking Skills in Science Read-alouds are a valuable strategy for introducing nonfiction text, articles, and current events to students that can also promote deeper understanding, higher-level thinking, and increased engagement. Learn how to prepare and implement read-alouds in your science class. Planning and Implementing a Whole School Book Read in an Urban High School I will share my experiences with 5 years in a row of planning and implementing a whole school book read at my urban high school. Each book had a health science focus and was read, at least in part, in every classroom, in every content area. This culminated with a whole school exhibition. The Martian in the Physical Science Classroom Incorporating science literacy into the curriculum can be seamless when using the right novel. The Martian by Andy Weir provides an ideal launchpad to bring real-world science "faction" enrichment to your classroom.

SPEAKERS:
Lindsay Santen (Columbus City Schools: Columbus, OH), Meredith Hegarty (Middle School Science Teacher: College Park, GA)

Hear from middle school educators about the resources and tools they have used to develop a community of collaborative learners. They will share ideas for hands-on manipulative learning experiences and building scientific literacy skills.

Making Salsa = Making Connections!
How can making salsa help you grow your classroom community? This session will describe an engaging activity that was educational and impactful in many different ways. Students dehydrated and rehydrated salsa recipes so astronauts on the ISS could enjoy some flavorful food.

Meaningful CER in Physical Science
Exploration on developing more in-depth Claim Evidence and Reasoning investigations in Physical Science. Now that the Milestone EOC has been removed from this course, learn more about diving deeper into content will support students' scientific literacy.

SPEAKERS:
Kathy Biernat (Zanilu Educational Services, LLC: No City, No State), Stephanie McDonald (Teacher: , GA), Aliyah Johnson (Alpharetta High School: Alpharetta, GA)

Join middle school educators as they share strategies for supporting students to develop questions, writing of lab reports, and the development of time management skills.

A better way to do middle school lab reports
One challenge that we face as science teachers is the dreaded lab report. How do we teach the scientific method with such diverse classes, without it being too overwhelming? I have a strategy that has worked well with middle school students to introduce lab reports, and I will share the template.

Time Management Techniques for the Science Classroom
Are your students disorganized with labs/activities not getting completed? Do you find that sensemaking activities are taking more time than expected? This session presents time management techniques to support students efficiently using class time.

Effectively Engage Students in the SEP Asking Questions with the Question Formulation Technique
Participants will engage in an effective instructional strategy, the Question Formulation Technique (QFT), to help students develop explanatory questions to investigate phenomena.

SPEAKERS:
Kyla Corelli (Atlanta International School: Atlanta, GA), Alison Seymour (Science Teacher: Winchester, 0), Rebecca Garelli (Arizona Science Teachers Association)

Join these middle school educators as they share strategies to support students in modeling their ideas in the classroom.

Model Your Anchor Phenomenon Early and Often: A Strategy for Sensemaking
1. Have students make an initial model based on prior knowledge and assumptions about the natural world. *Predict. Wonder. Be wrong!* 2. Dedicate time for students to continually revise their models as they acquire more evidence and content understanding. 3. Watch the lightbulb turn on!

Read Alouds: Developing Literacy and Thinking Skills in Science
Read-alouds are a valuable strategy for introducing nonfiction text, articles, and current events to students that can also promote deeper understanding, higher-level thinking, and increased engagement. Learn how to prepare and implement read-alouds in your science class.

Flippity: A go to versatile tool to increase engagement
Flippity can "easily turn Google™ spreadsheets into flashcards and other cool stuff." This session will highlight three go to interactives to increase student engagement with one another and with content. Consider bringing a device to practice creating one or two of these cool things. Hacking the Secret Garden with 3D eLearning Experiences Elementary preservice teachers and students hack the science of school gardens and digitally present details of garden-based phenomena that meets NGSS 3D learning.

SPEAKERS:
Allison Wise (American Community School of Abu Dhabi: Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates), Jeff Thomas (University of Southern Indiana: Evansville, IN)

Join middle school educators sharing experiences of growing experimental gardens, and teaching weather.

Creating & Maintaining an Experimental Hydroponic Online Garden
Create a long-term experiment, where students must act daily with nature to help collect, analyze and publish data online. Students sustain and maintain and experimental garden where variables such as light, water and plant nutrients can be manipulated to optimize growing conditions.

Who needs to know about weather?
Weather Lessons Use it to make sense of the maps and numbers of weather from television, radio, newspapers and the Internet. Relate them to local weather. The WeatherCycler Lesson puts weather systems into motion so that you can see why the forecast is what it is. Make your own weather forecasts with it. My NASA Dat

How an Open World Game Supports Students Computational Thinking in Science
What is computational thinking (CT) and why should students practice CT? Learn about what CT is, why to integrate CT skills into science class, and how the Pack, an open-world digital game, can provide diverse entry points for students to explore problem-solving and algorithms.

SPEAKERS:
Peter Kelly (Brandywine Springs School), Diane Ripollone (Cardinal Gibbons High School: Raleigh, NC), Laycca Umer (NYSCI: Corona, NY)

Your students deserve some recognition! Join our presenter as they highlight opportunities for your students to get involved in Nationally recognized STEM based programs.

The Scoop on K-12 STEM Competitions Administered by NSTA
Join us for a chance to learn about the value and how to implement K-12 STEM innovative competitions with hands-on learning strategies utilized to motivate engagement. NSTA administered competitions include Army Educational Outreach Program, Shell Science Lab Regional Challenge and the Toshiba/NSTA

Engaging K-12 students in STEM innovation projects - Where to begin and how to get started
In this speed sharing session, participants will collaborate together on effective strategies to engage K-12 students in STEM innovation projects.

SPEAKERS:
Acacia McKenna (NSTA: Arlington, VA), Winnie Boyle (NSTA: No City, No State), Amanda Upton (NSTA: Arlington, VA), Michelle Butler (National Science Teaching Association: No City, No State), Kathryn Lasky (NSTA/Army Educational Outreach Program)

This session will be organized around curriculum-anchored assessment literacy. Building on the compelling evidence emerging for curriculum based professional learning (i.e, professional learning that is connected to the curriculum teachers are implementing in the classroom), this speed session will explore ways to forget the decontextualized modules that have defined assessment literacy for decades, and focus on strategies to build assessment literacy through the process of more deeply understanding curriculum implementation. This session will highlight strategies educators across the country are using to advance better assessment practices, including those related to curriculum-based assessment system analysis, student work analyses, and equitable grading practices. Note: we will organize our own set of presenters, drawn from teachers, regional science instructional leaders, and state leadership. This session is appropriate to all grade-levels.

TAKEAWAYS:
By connecting assessment literacy to what teachers are doing in the classroom, we can focus on deep functional assessment literacy, and worry less about artificial boundaries established based on assessment types and terminology

SPEAKERS:
Aneesha Badrinarayan (Learning Policy Institute: Washington, DC)

The pandemic has dramatically altered our students, and therefore our classrooms and teaching have had to adjust as well. In this share-a-thon, the 2020 class of STEM Scholars will share what we have learned and how we have changed as a result of pandemic teaching. We will share our struggles, our miserable failures, our innovative ideas, as well as our successes. We are a diverse set of teachers from throughout the country, so all participants will be able to relate and learn something that can be imeediately applied in their own classrooms.

TAKEAWAYS:
1. Discover new ideas, lessons, and projects that you can use in your middle school classroom; 2. Network with other middle school teachers from around the country; and 3. What lessons have we learned through pandemic teaching, how has it changed us and our students.

SPEAKERS:
Tammy Bartlett (Dinwiddie Elementary School: Dinwiddie, VA), Katie Lee (Cockrill Middle School: McKinney, TX), Patrick Marti (Villa Academy: Seattle, WA), Erin Lange (Surfside Middle School: Panama City Beach, FL), Rob Jackson (Seaman Middle School: Olathe, KS), Amanda Huff (Christian County Middle School: Hopkinsville, KY), Allison Bogart (Stonecreek Junior High: No City, No State)

Are you looking for new and creative ways to assess learning in your classroom? Join educators in sharing assessment practices aimed at the middle school classroom.

Stop Signs and Stop Lights: When and How to Check in with Students to Maximize Feedback and Understanding
Want to give more feedback and formatively assess your students on the fly? Learn some quick tools to support student consensus, sensemaking, and your gauge of their understanding. These are quick and easy protocols that anyone can implement!

Reassessment: Closing the Learning Gap
How can we, as educators, promote life-long learning and a growth mindset? Provide opportunities for reassessment. Give students the chance to show their new learning of concepts and skills. This is not a retake or a “do-over”, but an honest demonstration of proficiency.

SPEAKERS:
Johanna Brown (Washington State OSPI), Allison Wise (American Community School of Abu Dhabi: Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates)

Are you a middle school teacher looking for resources for your classroom? Join these educators as they share creating units teaching metric measures, discover the Teach the Earth Portal, and hear about one educator's experience of incorporating the 5E model into their lessons.

Designing Units
Learn how to create designer units based on standard metric measures. These units will be built based on volume measurements so students will be able to make connections to liquid measurement containers that students see and use in everyday life.

5 E's Made EEEEEasy!
The 5 E Model in science education is a great tool to help promote hands-on learning. Learn what the 5 E's are and how to effectively use them in your classroom. Help students make sense of their learning and make connections to the real world with the 5 E's.

Teach the Earth: A Portal to Earth Education Resources
The National Association of Geoscience Teachers manages the Teach the Earth portal, where educators can search for online resources in the geosciences and related fields.  Instructional approaches, classroom activities, course descriptions, and sample assignments make up the many resources in TTE.

SPEAKERS:
Elaine Thurmond (Mercer University: Lithia Springs, GA), Mary Kay Bacallao (Mercer University: Atlanta, GA), Kristi Gnage (Science Teacher: St. Petersburg, FL), Christy Visaggi (Georgia State University: Atlanta, GA)

Are you a middle school educator looking for inspiration? Join these educators as they share resources and strategies on using food and cooking in the STEM classroom, student-led mentorship in STEM classrooms, and learn how to use PolyDensity bottles to investigate concepts in the physical science classroom. Implementing STEM Kits to Improve Recruitment and Retention of Underrepresented Communities in Engineering Student-led mentorship programs can be fantastic early intervention tools that can be implemented in a variety of learning settings. Here we share a STEM Kit that high school mentors use with middle school mentees to improve recruitment and retention. Tinkering with Food & Cooking to Explore Science Purposefully Learn how to leverage food and cooking to encourage tinkering and sensemaking to make your secondary science curriculum engaging, meaningful, visual, and “sticky” (literally and metaphorically). Free resources (& lesson plans) included. Poly-density Bottles DIY for Inquiry I will share how to create your own cool polydensity bottles and use them for student inquiry activities that relate to many topics including density, molecular properties, and solubility.

SPEAKERS:
Claire Abrams (Student Intern: Washington, DC), Kimberly Jacoby Morris (STEM Program Coordinator), Kate Strangfeld (Harvard University: Cambridge, MA), Kelly Moore (Tennessee Tech: Cookeville, TN)

Are you a secondary educator looking for new resources to use in the classroom? Join this team of educators as they share resources from the US Geological Survey website, the paleontological society and National Park Service, and learn how to host a night sky observation event.

Data Literacy: Using US Geological Survey Datasets in the Classroom
Current Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow, Candyce Curry, discussing FREE RESOURCES from the U.S. Geological Survey website. This conversation will give teachers insight on finding & using, with minimal preparation, datasets from multiple sources within the website.

How to host a a star party for night sky observations
I will share my experience of hosting evening star parties for 15 years. And, I will provide a simple blueprint and share resources to help you plan an event. Night sky observation events engage students and romanticize science.

Exploring the expansion of the Universe, the Cosmological Principle, and the Big Bang Theory with a Hoberman Sphere.
We will explore how a Hoberman Sphere can be used to model the expansion of the Universe and the Big Bang Theory. Students manipulate and measure the physical model to explore the cosmological red shift, the cosmological principle, Hubble's law, and the Big Bang Theory.

SPEAKERS:
Candyce Curry (US Geological Survey), Lars Nelson (Teacher)