Today I went to Des Moines for a meeting with the Iowa Department of Education about the state-wide STEM initiative and the Common Standards that would replace the Iowa Core Curriculum.
We learned that the Iowa Core and the Common Core will become one document by the end of the year. Rita Martins and Judith Spittle spoke about the transition of the Common Core to the Iowa Core and said that the Common Core is not a curriculum..but rather, it is a set of common goals. It will be grade specific..not in spans like 3-5 etc...
We discussed how we could increase STEM learning in Iowa. Changing the funding, teaching in a more project based way, putting STEM into the vision of ELI and Evey Student Counts were some of the ideas.
There is a website for us to use called Iowastem.org.
They said that minority populations of students are being accelerated out of STEM fields and we need to level the number of minority students going into STEM fields so it matches the percentage of population they represent in Iowa.
We met as a science group after lunch. We were asked to nominate a secondary science teacher for the presidential teaching award. Yvette McCulley led this part of the meeting.
These are the NSTA strategic goals:
1. Promote active participation of all teachers of science in improving science education.
2. Advocate for the central role of science education to benefit students and society
3. Support high quality science teaching to improve student learning for the 21st Century.
4. Influence research in science education and promote it's wide application to improve science teaching and student learning.
Mary Sullivan talked about data and evaluation. We discussed using information such as what professional development corresponds with what kind of achievement scores. We discussed sharing information better. One of the university representatives said that she'd like more information on how students excel so she could lead them better to a career in college.
I was really wondering about how we compare our data with other nations and whether most countries send all children to school the way we do...such as low functioning or low sociology-economic populations. I asked Mary Sullivan, and she said she didn't know, but she'd find out, and she took my business card to hopefully get back to me.
-Colleen Anderson spoke about Theory of Action. We made short, medium and long term goals for science education in Iowa.
-Evan Abbey talked about online learning initiatives..the website is http://bit.lyonlineinitiatives
-There will be a statewide Moodle server with online tools being developed
Moodle.aea11.k12.ia.us/moodle
-We received a 2.7 million dollar grant for Iowa schools to deliver online content courses, especially for districts to offer courses to small numbers of students.
-Iowa learning online is a DE initiative
OLLIE. Is online learning for Iowa educators
Jeff Weld is going to have Tonja Richards interview me next week for their newspaper. He said I'd be a great STEM story.
It was fun to go to a Department of Education meeting. I've never been to one before, and it was nice to learn about what they are like. I didn't know that the universities were communicating so well with the Department of Education, and that's nice to see!
