Written By Trevore Humphrey and Minjuan Wang

The NSF-CNH project has a significant educational component that includes teachers’ professional development in both China and the U.S. The May 2016 workshop was the third year, where the project team has paired up with a group of highly-productive local teachers, in order to use the data, models, and other related information from this project to teach relevant concepts and principles to students of a variety of age levels and subject areas.

The teachers involved with the project, while a small group of 8, represent a highly diversified cross section of both grade levels and subject areas. There are also several returning teachers who have worked with the project team for several years. They are also exemplary in using project-related data, photos, video, maps, and publications in their curriculum development and teaching. Significant learning outcomes have been reported out of their classroom implementation.

An Overview of the project was given by Dr. Li An followed by several presentations from project members; Trevore Humphrey, Dr. Hsiang Ling Chen, graduate assistant Rick Zhang, and Dr. Minjuan Wang.

The teachers were provided access and instruction on how to use the growing Google archive of project-related materials. They can also download and view lesson plans created in the past three years, to help them develop their own quality lesson plans.

The selected group of educators included veterans of the project, Rose Ann Morris from Mountain Empire School District and Ruth Maas from Steel Canyon High School. Jaime Schoenbrun and Gina Alves were new teachers who work with Elementary students in Campo. Lisha Brunache and Paula Chicoka work with high school and middle school students in San Diego (Innovation Middle School) and San Marcos. Overall the workshop had a diverse and experienced set of teachers who will now take what they gained from the project and develop standards based lessons to share with hundreds of students throughout the San Diego County region. Their lesson plans will be posted on Schoology for public access. We welcome teachers from around the country to learn more about this project.