TEA Collaborative Learning Group
Overview of Plan

Hochstrasser

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Team Members:

What is your role within your team?

What professional growth goals do you and your team members hope to reach through this partnership?

How will you and your team reflect on these goals and on learning and classroom practice (e.g., pedagogy, the use of technology, content, the process of science)?

Mentoring Plan (Revised from Orientation)

At this point in time, my mentoring plan is I believe, incomplete. I am currently in the process of working with Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio on a plan to include education students in the mentoring plan. 

The outline of this plan would be to include education students in a curriculum design program using TEA Information and TEA contacts. These students would follow TEA activities in the field and act as additional liaisons between the TEA and the educational community.  Students would have to opportunity to earn credit through an independent study classification. These education students would also have the opportunity to use the TEA as the mentoring/supervising teacher for their education internship. This availability would allow the TEA mentoring relationship to continue through the students' educational experience. Students would have the opportunity to field test their polar lessons under the guidance of the TEA. As mentioned, this portion of the mentoring plan is still under development with many details yet to be settled. 

For the more traditional portion of a mentoring plan, I have identified four teachers to be included in the mentoring program. This group includes one high school, one intermediate school, and two elementary school teachers. I would like to include a junior high school instructor in the group as well but I have not identified a candidate at this time. This group will meet on a scheduled basis to develop curriculum to include polar programs in the classroom. The primary goal of this group will be to create curriculum and match that curriculum to state science standards as well as apply the lessons to the Ohio State Proficiency Exam. 

Early meetings of this mentoring team will focus on familiarization with the TEA website and with TEA programs. Mentees will enroll as TEA associates and become familiar with all aspects of the associate program. While continuing to develop and align curriculum the team will also become familiar with different aspects of polar research. We will be traveling to the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University and speaking with polar research teams from the University of Cincinnati. The Ohio area has a wealth of polar resources and research that the team will be identifying and organizing for use in classrooms across the state of Ohio. It will be the ultimate goal of the group to develop some type of polar resource guide to be made available to teachers in Ohio.