Overview

InTeGrate classroom modules align with high-impact practices that enhance earth literacy among middle school, high school, and college students. In this workshop, designed for instructors who want to adopt some of these new materials into their courses, participants will learn about InTeGrate activities via lesson presentations, small-group work time, and active discussions. Middle and high school teachers will benefit from presentations about how these teaching materials are linked to the NGSS. We will also address some of the challenges of instruction in two year colleges, such as adapting and using the materials in a diverse classroom, making use of the student learning outcomes and assessments, overcoming articulation issues, and developing administrative buy-in.

Target Audience

This workshop is specifically designed for earth science teachers of middle school, high school, and introductory-level college classes who want to incorporate InTeGrate modules into their own courses. Workshop attendees will get hands-on experience using a number of activities from the InTeGrate module collection. Attendees will return to their classrooms with a new arsenal of relevant, active-learning-based strategies and techniques that have been shown to be effective in introductory-level earth science courses.

Goals

The goals of this workshop are to:

• facilitate the incorporation of InTeGrate modules into introductory earth science courses taught by middle and high school teachers and two-year college faculty and instructors
• explicitly link the activities to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
• identify and discuss the challenges associated with incorporating new classroom materials in two-year college classrooms

Format

One month prior to the workshop we will ask participants to rank their interest in potential topics, and we will draw on these responses to select the lesson materials. Each day we will demonstrate two or three lessons as they would be taught in a classroom; workshop participants will play the role of the students. We will discuss how these activities can be adapted to various types of classroom settings and provide opportunities for reflections. The list of potential topics includes: climate changes, mineral resources, natural hazards (in context with risk and vulnerability), water resources, plate boundary hazards, soil resources, hurricanes, and environmental justice related to freshwater resources.