Michelle Sedberry, Project Director for the ESC Region 17 Science Collaborative in Lubbock has just published, Creating Future Engineers Through Elementary Engineering Professional Development, in which she outlines the five fundamental pillars for improving student success in science. Michelle was inspired to research this area as part of her master’s thesis after becoming a Project Director. As she says, “The TRC trained me to critically look at the instructional practices being used in my professional development. I examined what I was expecting to see from teachers and looked in the mirror to see if I saw myself modeling those practices. Through this process I developed five fundamental pillars of successful professional development. In my research, I began using these practices in select workshops, testing content knowledge with pre- and post-tests as well as surveys after workshops to get a gauge of the implementation of the strategies I was modeling. This next grant year I will be doing a full implementation of the five pillars into all workshops delivered to our STMs and CMs. I plan to train the ITMs in the five pillars as well so we have a uniform structure in delivering content to our teachers.” Michelle is committed to a program that incorporates an explicit long-term plan with no assumptions made about teacher background knowledge. She also incorporates STEM career contexts into workshops to enable teachers to frame content this way in the classroom helping students to make a deeper connection to the content and increasing student engagement.
Creating Future Engineers Through Elementary Engineering Professional Development is published by Scholars’ Press, ISBN 978-3639665338.
