Last week, CTSC hosted another Fall Institute, training new teachers transdisciplinary backwards design. These are teachers from across New York, who have been working with us over the course of the past year for our STILE research project, funded by the National Science Foundation. If you're curious about our work with STILE, you can find out about the project work here.
Our goals are to help teachers gain support within their schools to implement meaningful projects with technology across a range of subjects, and to position these teachers as designers of rigorous, authentic projects. Although new technology is exciting and fresh, it must also be accompanied by thoughtfully designed projects!
For our PD sessions, we always love to kick off with a transdisciplinary STEM challenge -- today's mission used a popular third grade reading text called Pop's Bridge by Eve Bunting, illustrated by C.F. Payne. The story follows a boy who's father works on building the Golden Gate Bridge. Disaster strikes during construction, and the working crews face a serious safety issue. For our challenge, the teachers read this book to identify an engineering problem, designed a solution and prototyped physical models of their designs on a pair of Lego bridge models. Using recycled & household materials, they were able to make some fairly fancy upgrades!
Teachers then completed a Flipgrid reflection on whether their proposed solutions would fit the budget of a Depression-era government agency. Adding an additional constraint after their first prototyping phase allowed teachers to view the challenge from a new perspective. They began to think critically about their designs, asking "Do we really need this?" Sharing out afterwards, the teachers expressed that this added constraint during the middle of the project helped them really focus their visions. Moving forward, we hope they can take this experience as a model for transdisciplinary challenges that can be implemented in their own classrooms!
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