Project+Summary

July 14-25, 2008, a group of 53 teachers worked with professors at Oklahoma State University to improve their content knowledge and teaching strategies. The Northeast Oklahoma STEM Partnership grant offered teachers a chance to work together as a team to engage in sustainability engineering design activities and in integrating content knowledge to solve authentic problems. Each teacher team also designed additional problem-based learning lessons to be taught collaboratively in their own schools.

Following seven days of instruction from OSU and Langston faculty members, the teachers tried out their designed lessons on a group of area students selected for a two-day student engineering academy. During the academy, students engaged in engineering activities such as building bridges, designing better running shoes, creating survival shelters on a deserted island, building catapults, and addressing global warming problems. They increased content knowledge in math, science, language arts, social studies, information literacy and information technology as they solved authentic engineering problems.

Each team of teachers designed their own problem-based learning lessons featuring an engineering design challenge and cross-content curriculum. Teams taught these lessons in their schools, collecting data on student learning and engagement through a reflective Teacher Work Sample. All of the engineering-focused, cross-curricular, problem-based learning lessons designed by higher education faculty and participating teacher teams were contributed to the lesson base for the K20 Center Alternative Education project (http://alt.k20center.org).

The higher education faculty continued to collaborate with the K12 teachers throughout the 08-09 school year through follow-up workshop days and a wiki (http://osuitq.wikispaces.com) for online interactivity. Professors from OSU included Dr. Susan Stansberry, Educational Technology and Library Media; Dr. Gayla Hudson, Research; Dr. Jean Dockers, Science Education; Dr. Pasha Antonenko, Educational Technology; Dr. Karen High, Engineering; and Dr. Rebecca Damron, English. Dr. Alonzo Peterson, math professor from Langston University, also served as an instructor.

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