2015 Winter Workshop for K-12 teachers in San Diego

2015 NSF-CNH Teacher Workshop

On Saturday November 1st the NSF-CNH project team held our third teacher workshop to fulfill the project’s educational goals (Figure 1). The workshop updated the veteran teachers to the project team’s summer work in China as well as introduced the project to some newly selected teachers from a diverse set of backgrounds and educational settings. After a brief introduction from our project members and teacher participants there were a series of short presentations given as listed below.
a. Introductory/Summer Updating Presentation (overview of project and content), by Dr. Li An (PI of CNH project)
b. Specific presentation on CNH research, by Rebecca Lewison (Professor of Biology, Director of Institute for Ecological Monitoring & Management)
c. Summer and Specific Research, by Shuang Yang (Doctoral student in Geography)
d. Participatory mapping and Survey of the School Children, by Stuart Aitken (Professor of Geography)
e. Google Earth Mapping and geo-tagged photo collection of FNNR, by Stephen Crook (Doctoral student in Geography).

Fig-2015_TeacherWorkshop1Figure 1. Participants of the 2015 Workshop

Following a short lunch break the teachers used the afternoon time to start creating or continue developing their curricular materials (lesson plans, unit outlines, etc.), with the support and help of the project members. By having the teachers work immediately on their curriculum not only was the content fresh from the morning presentations but the chance to work alongside a variety of teachers helped promote ideas and support the design process. This collaborative and supported development process will ensure a solid curricular foundation for the work these teachers will be doing. With a diverse set of subject areas and grade levels represented by the participating teachers, the project team expects to receive a variety of rich curricular materials that will be valuable for teaching across the k-12 spectrum by the spring of 2016. We will be sharing these materials and lessons as they become available through the CNH project website.