TEA Collaborative Learning Group
Overview of Plan

Muhs

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Team Members:
Tom Haff Paul Witt Becky Fowler Bob Olona Kathy Olsen

What is your role within your team?
Information pipeline

What professional growth goals do you and your team members hope to reach through this partnership?
1) Improving Content area knowledge in physical science 2) Deepening understanding of modern research methods 3) Building real-timeconnections between high school students and current research 4) Developing curriculum that reflects the other goals

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)
As part of the TEA (Teachers Experiencing Antarctica), I am required to develop a mentoring plan. The plan’s broad goal is to improve how science is taught, using polar science and the individual TEA teacher’s travel and research as a springboard.

As conceived by the TEA program, mentoring is a long term process in which teachers act as colleagues to broaden and deepen their effectiveness as science teachers. The mentoring group involves the lead TEA teacher, and can include new teachers, experienced teachers, cross-curricular groups, or cross-age groups. Rather than a top-down model, where the lead TEA teacher delivers information and resources to the other teachers, the mentoring model proposes that all members of the group parcticipate in personal and group goal setting over a long period of time. Then, group members work in concert to support one another’s efforts to meet their goals. The National Science Foundation (NSF), which underwrites the TEA program, requires a performance benchmark to demonstrate the mentoring process has taken place. The TEA teacher must document 140 hours of collaborative group work with a group of 3 teacher colleagues over 3 years. While this requirement seems focused on the hours rather than any outcomes, it’s clear that the actual process and outcomes are really more important that the hours themselves. In 140 hours, team building, goal setting, curriculum building, and evaluation should move the polar science into the classroom. This movement is in the context of student-centered activities promoting inquiry.

I’ll develop a mentoring group within our growing network of WALTA teachers. WALTA (Washington Area Large-scale Time-coincidence Array) is a cosmic ray detector network that is currently under construction, run by Dr. Jeffrey Wilkes from the University of Washington. We are refurbishing cosmic ray scintillator detectors, training teachers and students in their use and maintenance, and installing them into schools throughout the Seattle area. When linked to a central computer, these will be able to provide valuable data on ultra-high energy cosmic rays (an as yet poorly understood frontier of astrophysics) Similar projects are springing up in a number of sites throughout North America, and eventually, we hope to link these schools and local networks. So WALTA and its several "sister" projects will be largely built by high school students and teachers, and we’ve already developed a group of local physics teachers who are building curriculum in high energy parcticle physics. These teachers are highly motivated, and will be parcticularly interested in my TEA experience if I am selected to work on one of the astrophysics projects at the South Pole. At Amundsen-Scott station, there are scintillator detectors exactly like the ones we built in our WALTA workshop last week. So there are strong links in my association with both projects, and there’s a pressing and immediate need to develop methods to bring this kind of high energy physics curriculum into the classroom. This project can leverage modern high-energy physics and real scientific inquiry into classrooms. In Seattle, we’ve got a network of 15 teachers who are involved with the WALTA project and are developing appropriate curriculum tools. I think the interest level of our WALTA teachers and their students in my experience in the AMANDA project could be very high.. I think there’s an opportunity for some powerful synergy in a mentoring group. Teacher involvement in the WALTA project is partially sponsored by QuarkNet, an NSF educational initiative out of FermiLab to support modern high-energy physics education. I’ve been associated with QuarkNet for several years and this year, I’ve been a lead teacher with QuarkNet, and helped steer our Seattle planning towards the WALTA project. QuarkNet associates hundreds of physics teachers nationwide, and I think I could help link TEA and QuarkNet. If I can work with a high-energy astrophysics project, I see a very significant overlap in interest between TEA and the QuarkNet program. The WALTA project provides a basis for collaborative efforts among teachers and students. For instance, we’re already planning a conference by and for students about their WALTA project at their individual schools. In this project, students are involved in real research, and one of our goals is to create a setting where they can present their work and findings to a network of their student peers. Additionally, some WALTA teachers will present their work on the project at local and national conferences of physics teachers. In summary, components of my mentoring plan are:

a) a group of Seattle – area teachers already involved in the WALTA cosmic ray project b) developing teaching ideas and curriculum, including multimedia, reading resources, and labs about cosmic rays and high-energy astrophysics (specifically around the WALTA project) c) creation of student-centered scientific conference on cosmic rays d) collaborative presentations at Teacher conferences including NSTA and AAPT (American Association of Physics Teachers e) closely following TEA Jason Petula’s work this year on AMANDA, the cosmic ray detector network under construction at the South Pole Station. f) Developing tools and a plan to bring my own trip into the classrooms of colleagues.