The 19-month project is a partnership between faculty at the colleges and 4th- and 5th-grade teachers and administrators in five area school divisions and local schools (Bedford, Amherst, Appomattox and Campbell counties, Lynchburg City and James River Day School). It was made possible by a $199,502 grant through the Math-Science Partnership program from the Virginia Department of Education, awarded in spring 2011.

In collaboration with STEM and education faculty at the two colleges, 17 school teachers from the area spent the past year developing integrated STEM lessons — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — through an “iterative lesson study” process, creating lesson plans and instructional videos. Each lesson features either an inquiry- or problem-based teaching approach, engaging students in investigation and data analysis.

“These approaches to teaching and learning are known to help students access higher level problem solving skills and to develop critical thinking,” said Jill Granger, project director and professor of chemistry at Sweet Briar.

At the conference, project participants will give presentations and offer workshops to other local teachers. About 100 Central Virginia teachers are expected to participate.

Granger said the lesson plans and instructional videos will be disseminated via the Virginia Department of Education’s iTunes University and a project website this summer. Starting in September, the project’s participating teachers will “help others in their schools to adopt the new lessons for their classrooms,” she added.

For more information, email granger@sbc.edu or call (434) 381-6166. To read more about the project and grant, click here.

Contact: Janika Carey

And sometimes, that ‘real world’ is in fact another classroom. For the past few weeks, rising seniors Alyssa Berkeley and Jessica Murphy have been interning at Lynchburg’s Gifted Opportunities Center at R.S. Payne Elementary School. Berkeley teaches mostly science to fourth-graders; Murphy teaches social studies to one of two fifth-grade classes.

With its creative curriculum, the G.O. Center turned out to be a perfect fit for Murphy, who double-majors in dance and liberal studies:

“An unexpected surprise when I first began teaching was to find that they were working on their spring musical,” she said. “When I informed my mentor teacher of my dance background, she allowed me to choreograph several of the numbers.”

Clearly, Murphy has had a blast utilizing her talent.

“The students are so full of suggestions and enthusiasm. I cannot wait to see the whole finished project in a few weeks!”

Berkeley’s experience has been just as positive:

“The best part of this internship by far has been having my students tell me that learning science with me is the best part of their day,” she said. “It has inspired me to want to learn more and become a better science teacher for them.”

At Sweet Briar, Berkeley majors in elementary and special education. The internship allows her to put many of her educational theories to the test, and to interact with her students in ways she didn’t anticipate before.

“I love looking up little facts for them and being able to answer their complicated questions,” she said. “They light up every time we work on their animal projects, and it’s oh so much fun to experience them having ‘a-ha!’ moments.”

In just a few weeks, Berkeley has grown attached to them.

“I’ve come to know these kids better than I’ve known most of the classes I’ve worked with since I came to Sweet Briar, and they are a wonderful and diverse group of children and have taught me more than I could ever have imagined in the past three weeks.”

With only a few days left before summer break, their internships are almost over, but both students say they would like to come back next year.

“This has really stretched my boundaries as a teacher and has been a very educating and fun experience,” Berkeley said. “If I wasn’t in love with teaching already, this would have made me be!”

Murphy agrees:

“I would love to come back and do my actual student-teaching here. In these short few weeks I’ve already learned so much about what being a teacher is really all about. They are the world’s best multi-taskers for sure! I have developed the utmost respect for my host teacher and her colleagues, and I can’t believe my time with them has come to an end so soon. Hopefully I can work with them again in the future.”

Contact: Janika Carey

The conference is intended for K-12 teachers and other educators, including curators and interpreters from historical societies or museums. It is co-sponsored by the Tusculum Institute, an educational center that promotes environmentally sustainable preservation of historic buildings and places, and the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.

Workshop sessions are led by historians, K-12 teachers, curators and museum guides and will focus on the War of 1812 and the socio-historic context of James Madison and James Monroe’s presidencies. Referred to as “America’s second war of independence,” the War of 1812 pitted the newly founded United States against one of the world’s biggest navies, Great Britain. Speakers include historian and author Don Hickey, museum educator Sterling Howell, K-12 teacher Rita Bradunas, Monroe interpreter Dennis Bigelow, military historian Stuart Butler, and Jarod Kearney, curator at the James Monroe Museum.

All sessions will be held in Josey Dining Room (in Prothro Hall) on the campus of Sweet Briar College in Amherst County, Va. Attendance is free for certified K-12 teachers and Sweet Briar students and $20 for all others. Coffee breaks and lunch are included. Qualified teachers will receive a stipend of $40 for participating, as well as continuing education unit credits. Participants must register by June 5 at tusculum.sbc.edu/TeachingHistoricPlaces_2012.

For more information, contact Lynn Rainville, director of the Tusculum Institute, at lrainville@sbc.edu or call (434) 381-6432 and leave a message.

Based on his paper “Creating a Global Community of Learners: Teachers—Alone—Are Not Enough,” Frank’s presentation argues against the vision of teaching popularized by the recent documentary “Waiting for Superman.”

“Instead of supporting policies and practices fixated on the idea that the teacher is wholly responsible for increasing student learning, we need to think in terms of ecologies of learning,” Frank said, adding that collaboration is key when it comes to teaching:

“We need to appreciate the multiple factors and relations that lead to student success. [Instead of] a unidirectional picture — a teacher teaches and a student learns — we need to develop a broader picture that is multi-directional, iterative and adaptive.”

Before coming to Sweet Briar, Frank taught secondary English and was a teacher educator at Montclair State University and at Teachers College, Columbia University. Frank teaches courses in the graduate and undergraduate program.

For more information, email jfrank@sbc.edu or call (434) 381-6430.

The Toshiba grant comes within a year of the Virginia Department of Education awarding the $199,502 Mathematics and Science Partnership Grant to the colleges. Last spring, teams began recruiting fourth- and fifth-grade teachers nominated by the participating schools for the project, which is titled “Central Virginia Collaborative for Developing STEM Lessons to Improve Learning in Grades 4 and 5.” In August, the teachers started developing integrated STEM lessons — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — through an “iterative lesson study” process.

The Toshiba grant will support the implementation of one of the classroom lessons developed as part of the MSP-DOE project.

“This is a great example of how our work with the area teachers has additive effects on the schools, classrooms and K-through-twelve students,” said Jill Granger, project director and professor of chemistry at Sweet Briar. “And it’s a great example of a collaborative K-through-twelve-college effort that is very much regionally based.”

For more information on last year’s DOE grant, see Colleges Team Up to Land Va. DOE Funds for STEM Development in Local Schools.

Bryan Alexander, senior fellow at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education, known as NITLE, will present “The New Digital Storytelling: Narratives for Education,” at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 11 in the 1948 Theater at the Sweet Briar College Fitness and Athletics Center.

Alexander, an expert in applying current and emerging technologies to enhance liberal arts education, will discuss the many ways digital technology can be used for effective communication. He has recently published a book on the subject, “The New Digital Storytelling: Creating Narratives with New Media.”

The book surveys the array of options that are readily available, including blogging, gaming, social media, podcasts and Web video. While digital media isn’t new, access to so many mediums by the general public is, Alexander says, and it is no longer necessary to be “tech-savvy” to use them.

Alexander’s book puts the “modern expression of the ancient art of storytelling” into historical context, in addition to illustrating how everyone can learn to make creative use of new media.

During the presentation, he will talk about the book, drawing on his own experience and research to describe how these various media offer “pathways for creativity, interactivity and self-expression.”

Alexander, who has a doctorate in English, has taught English, writing, information literacy and information technology studies. In addition to his ongoing research, he runs the NITLE futures market, a crowd-sourced prediction game. He contributes to Techne, NITLE’s blog, and was the lead author for eight years on its predecessor, Liberal Education Today. He tweets at @BryanAlexander.

For more information, call (434) 381-6205.

On March 1, the teams began recruiting fourth- and fifth-grade teachers nominated by the partner schools for the project, which is titled “Central Virginia Collaborative for Developing STEM Lessons to Improve Learning in Grades 4 and 5.”

From August 2011 to June 2012 the teachers will develop integrated STEM lessons — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — through an “iterative lesson study” process. These will result in a set of instructional videos to be disseminated and incorporated into the curriculum by the participating school systems in the next academic year.

Several circumstances led to the collaboration with Lynchburg College, said Jill Granger, project director and professor of chemistry at Sweet Briar. The DOE’s video requirement was a hurdle, because Sweet Briar doesn’t have the infrastructure that Lynchburg College has through its media center. The schools also realized they were going after the same funding.

“Collaboration allowed us to develop a more comprehensive grant proposal that capitalized on each college’s expertise,” said Paula Lichiello, assistant dean of graduate studies and project coordinator.

Lynchburg College, through its regional school division partners, knew the critical needs that could be addressed through the grant, while Sweet Briar’s team of science and math experts already had a project in mind.

Everything coalesced at a joint meeting with the school divisions’ math and science leaders. “It was their enthusiasm that really got this project moving,” Granger said.

Both colleges are experienced in teacher development programs, but Granger said the STEM project differs in some ways from earlier grant-funded training she has administered.

First, the “deliverables” will become part of the participating schools’ fourth- and fifth-grade curricula. The project won’t produce subject-specific lessons, but rather integrated STEM lessons that will track with Virginia’s Standards of Learning for each grade. The introduction of engineering components is also new, and it makes problem-based learning more important to the process, Granger said.

Previously, Sweet Briar’s teacher clinics emphasized inquiry-based instruction, with students answering questions using a scientific approach. In problem-based learning, students solve a problem by applying concepts they already know and by learning new ones as needed find a solution.

“Both are ‘hands-on, minds-on’ active forms of learning,” Granger said. “They are related but distinctly different teaching approaches designed to engage the students more deeply in critical thinking and analysis.”

The 18 teacher participants will test the teams’ initial lesson plans in their classrooms, evaluate and revise them, and repeat the process. Three of four iterations will be taped and edited by the teachers to capture what works best. LC’s media center will produce the video set, which will be disseminated at a regional conference for fourth- and fifth-grade teachers. The training videos and materials will be made available online.

“We want teachers showing their best practices in inquiry-based and problem-based learning. They’ll go through several iterations of taping so that in the end, the product will be refined,” Granger said.

The teachers will receive substantial stipends, materials for the classroom, and continuing education or graduate credit for their work.

Besides Granger, the Sweet Briar team includes biology instructor Arlene Vinion-Dubiel, engineering director Hank Yochum, director of graduate programs in education Jim Alouf, and math educator Cynthia Osterhus from Catawba College. SBC psychology professor Tim Loboschefski will provide the project’s external evaluation.

At Lynchburg College, in addition to Lichiello, Bill Noel, associate professor of communications and director of the Donovan Center, will lead the video production, and dean of graduate studies Ed Polloway serves on the Partnership Leadership Team.

“We are fortunate to have a high-spirited group of professionals dedicated to bringing best practices in math and science education into the classroom,” Granger said. “It’s energizing because the teachers have so many great ideas and when the results start coming back from the classroom, there’s nothing better than that — and we know they have the support of their division leaders. This is going to be fun.”

Jonathan Green, dean of the College, and his wife, Lynn Buck, were among roughly 200 attendees at the President’s Brunch at the ATE conference in Orlando, Fla., where Alouf accepted the president’s gavel and gave his opening remarks to the members in the audience.

According to its website, the association seeks to improve teacher education for school-based and post-secondary teacher educators. Members represent more than 700 colleges and universities, 500 major school systems and a majority of the country’s state education departments.

The association is based in the Washington, D.C., area, where it represents its members’ interests before government agencies and education organizations. In addition, ATE has representatives on the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education.

Alouf founded and directs Sweet Briar’s graduate education programs. He completed a three-year term on the ATE board of directors in February 2010 and served as chair of the association’s Legislative and Governmental Relations Committee for six years before his election to the board. He has been an ATE member since 1994.