I need help paying for the NSTA Conference fee, lodging, plane ticket from OKC to St. Louis, food and transportation around St. Louis so that I can become a better science teacher.
My students are our future scientists! They energetically enter the class, full of curiosity. Our high school is on the south side of Oklahoma City where the student body is 74% Hispanic, 8% black, and 13% white.
We have many ESL (English as a Second Language) and ELL (English Language Learners) students, and 100% of students are eligible for a free lunch.
These statistics indicate the challenges that many students have growing up in an lower income community on the south side of OKC but do not reflect the intelligence, compassion, and curiosity of the students!
My Project
As a teacher it is important to be a continuous learner and keep striving to perfect the craft of teaching. Usually there isn’t a budget for teachers to attend national conference on their subject matter to collaborate with other teachers and develop as teachers. I wish to attend the National Science Teachers Association National Conference to continue learning about science education and pedagogies.
I teach pre-AP and AP Biology classes and I know that my students are ready to take more ownership of their education.
To give them more student choice, I want to begin transition my classroom to more project based learning that feels relevant to their lives outside of academics. By attending NSTA, with the stand focus “jazzing up science with cross-curricular connections,” I hope to attend sessions such as “Unpacking Race in a Biology Classroom” and “Using Socio-Scientific Phenomena to Teach Biochemistry” to gather ideas on HOW to make connect content beyond the science. By integrating cross-curricular connections I hope to see more student investment. I know this from experience because when teaching DNA, my classes did a small class discussion on sexism in science surrounding Watson, Crick and Franklin. Those kids got so fired up! If I could incorporate more moments like that into the classroom in addition to transition to more project focused teaching I’m confident that students will take ownership of their own learning and develop deeper critical thinking skills.
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