NSF Awards: 1540704
The Robert Noyce Teacher Academy at the College of Staten Island developed and implemented international professional development program with the goal to include various experiential learning about several aspects of education in another country that foster constructive and reflective dialogue between educators from different countries about pedagogical practices in STEM disciplines. In the past 8 years, our Noyce scholars and alumni visited Ecuador, Russia, and Morocco to learn about different aspects of STEM education in these countries. Every part of the program was developed in collaboration with local educators and was planned as a combination of presentations/lectures, active immersion of participants into the topic, and collaborative reflection. In each country our participants visited schools to observe STEM classrooms, to meet with teachers and students, and to teach lessons. They visited teacher preparation programs at local universities and participated in pedagogy courses, round-table discussions, and meetings with pre-service teachers and faculty. They met with representatives of ministry of education and experts in educational policy and history of education. They also had a chance to learn about culture and history of each country.
The international STEM professional development experience for our Noyce scholars and alumni opened their eyes to new and innovative approaches to teaching STEM disciplines that many of them were able to transfer to their professional career. At the same time, it provided them with deeper appreciation for diversity and culture in their own classrooms.
Souad Outarid
Senior Teacher
Thank you for visiting our page! We are very excited to share with you our project. We would be very interested to learn what do you do in your STEM classrooms to connect your teaching and learning to student cultures?
Susannah O'Shea
Hicham Derdari
Timothy Corica
Irina Lyublinskaya
Carmen M
Good luck with this project. You are truly an inspiration. Thank you for being a mentor to my son.
Susannah O'Shea
Souad Outarid
Irina Lyublinskaya
Timothy Corica
Good luck with your classroom work, and this program! It is a wonderful concept!
Susannah O'Shea
Irina Lyublinskaya
Souad Outarid
Irina Lyublinskaya
Professor of STEM Education
Thank you, Tim! We have a group of outstanding young teachers who make an impact on math and science teaching in New York City. This experience widened their horizons about STEM education in other parts of the world.
Susannah O'Shea
Irina Lyublinskaya
Mikhail Kurnosenko
Lyuba family
Dear Irina, our best wishes to you in new endeavors!
we know you are capable of making it happen!
Irina Lyublinskaya
Souad Outarid
Susannah O'Shea
Hicham Derdari
Wishing everyone involved in this program a successful venture!! Great concept!!
Susannah O'Shea
Irina Lyublinskaya
Souad Outarid
Souad Outarid
Senior Teacher
Thank you Hisham.
Mac Cannady
Research Group Director
This is really cool work.
Can you say more about how you establish the relationships with the classrooms around the world? Are these pre-existing relationships?
Also, I really appreciated hearing about the experiences teachers had and what they gained from this experience from the teachers themselves. What metrics are you using to capture this impact on the teachers?
Thanks!
Souad Outarid
Susannah O'Shea
Irina Lyublinskaya
Souad Outarid
Senior Teacher
Thank you, Mr. Cannady,
My interaction with the Global Education in Morroco and Russia has opened my eyes to the communication gap that sometimes can be overlooked between the teacher and students from different backgrounds. Such experience like this helped me fill in these gaps along with my ability to convey the same to my fellow teachers to better benefit the level of education that we aiming for. It also, open my eyes on how the communication barrier can be more challenging than the language barrier.
All in all, my experience has confirmed my theory that's willing to learn is universal regardless of language, race or culture.
Irina Lyublinskaya
Stephanie Sheehan
Mathematics Teacher
Dear Mr. Cannady,
Thank you for your interest in our work!
Personally, I gained so much from this experience. Without the opportunity to travel to St. Petersburg, Russia through this unique program, I'm not sure I would have ever learned about, or experienced international education.
During my time in Russia, I learned a lot about culture and its influence on education. This was an eye opening experience because as a New York City public school teacher, my classroom is extremely diverse. I have students from all over the world, some of which are completely new to our country. Traveling to Russia helped me to appreciate different cultural perspectives on education, which is important for me as a teacher.
Overall, this was an amazing experience that taught me much more than I would ever learn inside a classroom.
Irina Lyublinskaya
Irina Lyublinskaya
Professor of STEM Education
Dear Mac,
College of Staten Island has very diverse faculty from all around the world. We started by using existing relationship of our faculty. As program developed and we started to see interesting results, we presented at International Congress for Mathematics Education in 2014 in Hamburg and that helped to establish new connections. We are now in conversations with Hungary, Germany and Israel, and I hope we will find interested educators to bring our scholars and alumni to Scandinavian and Asian countries as well.
In order to capture impact of the program we analyzed videos of teaching we have from the participants when they were in methods courses and student teaching practicum. We collect reflections from them during the program and we also ask for reflections and videos of teaching 1-2 years after the program.
I will leave up to my co-presenters to answer your second question. Thank you again for your interest!
Susannah O'Shea
Susannah O'Shea
Chemistry Teacher
Thank you, Mac!
Because of this program, I traveled to Russia and Morocco where I was able to learn about their education systems, teach chemistry classes to Russian and Moroccan students, and speak/collaborate with teachers and students at the high school and university level. I was able to sit down and observe high school physics, chemistry, and mathematics classes where I was able to see the classroom dynamics between the teacher and student and the level of rigor being taught at each grade level - both of which are very different than where I teach. In New York City we have a diverse population of students from around the world, which made it truly exciting and relevant to experience classroom environments and learn about academic expectations they may have previously experienced!
Irina Lyublinskaya
Susan McKenney
Professor
Thanks for sharing this very interesting work! I am inspired by this work and would like to make such experiences accessible to my students and staff. We have contacts that could be leveraged (as Irina describes above), but I wonder if you could please comment on how you have (a) integrated this into the program (e.g. part of a class, an extra? for credit, certificate, something else) and (b) how such experiences can be made affordable in the absence of a grant?
Thanks!
Susan
Susannah O'Shea
Irina Lyublinskaya
Irina Lyublinskaya
Professor of STEM Education
Dear Susan, thank you, you raised very important questions. This PD program is not part of course credit work. Since we have track 2 Noyce grant, this program is open to both, Noyce scholars and Noyce alumni. For alumni who are teachers we provide CTLE credits for this PD (that is continuing education units in New York) since our college is accredited PD provider. For undergraduate students in the program this is an extra-credit activity that they could use towards their honors program or just as a great experience to have.
We started to look at various options to make this program affordable when there will be no grant funding. I can only provide some ideas we have at this time, since we haven't implemented them yet. We are looking at possibilities of exchanges with home stays for this program - that would cover room and board expenses. Our Office for Global Engagement usually has financial aid for study abroad. We started discussions about possibilities to expand that to non-credit bearing international programs and if that will go forward we will be able to get stipends for our participants to cover travel expenses. Honors college has funds for our students for signature experiences, so there is an opportunity for Noyce Scholars to save these funds towards this program.
These are just few ideas we considered so far. If you have any other suggestions, we would love to hear them! Thank you.
Susannah O'Shea
Susan McKenney
Elena Rakova
I think you have a great future with your project.
Good luck!
Souad Outarid
Susannah O'Shea
Irina Lyublinskaya
Susannah O'Shea
Chemistry Teacher
Thank you!
Elena Kazakova
Отличный материал, который, безусловно, будет понятен и интересен нашим студентам
Susannah O'Shea
Irina Lyublinskaya
Irina Lyublinskaya
Professor of STEM Education
Спасибо!
Susannah O'Shea
Gail Rosenberg
Children learn best through hands on experiences.
The information they learn becomes part of them and easily connects to real world understanding. Performance based learning has proven time and again to be the most valuable experience. Assessing students’ understanding of science, Math, Social Studies, and more, can only become meaningful when students are part of the process and totally entrenched in the “doing”.
These videos demonstrate the power of exploration and learning through authentic experiences.We must, as a country, rethink our priorities and follow the model of these powerful educators,
Susannah O'Shea
Souad Outarid
Irina Lyublinskaya
Souad Outarid
Senior Teacher
100% Agreed.
Thank you.
Susannah O'Shea
Chemistry Teacher
Many of the classrooms and lessons that we observed were teacher-centered in these countries. When we were able to teach, we introduced student-centered lessons to the students and they seemed to truly enjoy it!
K. Renae Pullen
Elementary Science Specialist
What an awesome learning experience for teachers! Thank you so much for sharing. This really is some important and inspirational work.
How are teachers sharing their experience and innovative practices with their colleagues? Where can I learn more so than I can use your work to help my colleagues improve outcomes for our diverse and amazing kids?
Susannah O'Shea
Irina Lyublinskaya
Irina Lyublinskaya
Professor of STEM Education
Dear Renae, thank you for your interest. Our Noyce alumni become teacher-leaders in their schools when they are still novice teachers. Most of them become cooperating teachers and they mentor student-teachers, sharing their experiences. Many of them lead professional development workshops in their schools for their peers. Several teachers went to regional, state, and national conferences to share their work. When you are asking about learning more - do you want to learn more about this particular international experience or about our whole program?
Susannah O'Shea
K. Renae Pullen
K. Renae Pullen
Elementary Science Specialist
Both honestly. :)
Susannah O'Shea
Irina Lyublinskaya
Professor of STEM Education
General description of our Noyce program you can find here. It is not much - it is really mostly for prospective students as a recruitment tool, but if you send me an e-mail at irina.lyublinskaya@gmail.com I can share more materials that are not online.
K. Renae Pullen
Susannah O'Shea
Samantha Haimowitz
Teacher
Renae,
As a teacher in this project, I have shared my experiences with co-teachers by implementing new techniques in daily lessons. This project not only improved my teaching skills, but it gave me the opportunity to further connect with students. Since I have students from different countries, I am able to share my experiences in places that they may have come from. Being in the Galapagos helped me tremendously because I learned how to speak Spanish while teaching math. Now I can better communicate with my Spanish speaking students.
Irina Lyublinskaya
K. Renae Pullen
K. Renae Pullen
Elementary Science Specialist
Thank you so much for responding. This seems like such a wonderful learning and cultural experience. It's such a great opportunity to really change the way we think about our kids and the craft. As educators, we really don't get to explore our profession and collaborate with teachers and students around the world. This really is very exciting.
Irina Lyublinskaya
Stephanie Sheehan
Mathematics Teacher
Dear Ms. Pullen,
Thank you so much for your interest in our program and this project!
I totally agree, this professional development experience was a unique opportunity to change how we see the students that sit before us. Especially as a teacher in NYC, there are students of all different cultures in my classroom. Having this experience as a pre-service teacher really impacted my instruction, and my connection to my students.
Irina Lyublinskaya
Susannah O'Shea
Chemistry Teacher
Ms. Pullen,
We were able to sit down with teachers from these countries and compare notes on education systems and students' learning experiences. It was wonderful to collaborate with these teachers and learn from one another!
Emily Jensen
That is really interesting- what an innovative PD model!
Irina Lyublinskaya
Souad Outarid
Susannah O'Shea
Irina Lyublinskaya
Professor of STEM Education
Thank you!
Susannah O'Shea
Stephanie Sheehan
Mathematics Teacher
Thank you, Emily! It was an amazing experience.
Susannah O'Shea
Chemistry Teacher
Thank you so much, Emily!
This program has personally impacted my goal as an educator more than any other experience I have taken part in and has shown me how imperative it is to take part in culturally relevant pedagogy.
Danielle Espino
Very cool— applause to this global, teacher PD endeavor. Aside from reflections, were there any post-trip requirements for the teacher (ie presentation to their dept, or perhaps a video summary of takeaways as part of a larger repository for others, etc)? The reflections are a great source of data, I’d recommend checking out epistemic network analysis (ENA) as a methodology to visualize the change in connections from a teacher’s initial return to the data collected one or two years later
Souad Outarid
Irina Lyublinskaya
Stephanie Palumbo
Science Teacher
Hello Danielle,
Each year we create a presentation that is part of the NSF Noyce Summit in Washington DC. All participation is voluntarily and many of our previous participants continue to want to be involved after each experience.
Irina Lyublinskaya
Samantha Haimowitz
Teacher
After each trip, we created a presentation to demonstrate our work to the Noyce Teacher Education Honors Academy at the College of Staten Island. I also presented to my mathematics department after the trip to Russia. My fellow co-teachers were very intrigued about our experiences and felt it was a great learning opportunity.
Irina Lyublinskaya
Irina Lyublinskaya
Professor of STEM Education
Danielle, thank you for suggestion on analysis of data collected from this PD!
Susannah O'Shea
Jan Heiderer
This is a wonderful video and an AWESOME program. Great work! I see many connections with your work and ours @ The GLOBE Program, though we are focused on international education of Earth science. Check out our page at www.globe.gov and maybe we can find a way to connect.
Susannah O'Shea
Souad Outarid
Irina Lyublinskaya
Stephanie Sheehan
Mathematics Teacher
Dear Ms. Heiderer,
Thank you for your kind words about our project! It was truly an amazing experience as a pre-service teacher. I just checked out your site, amazing work! It seems like a truly meaningful and unique experience for educators and students.
Susannah O'Shea
Irina Lyublinskaya
Professor of STEM Education
Dear Jan, I really enjoyed your video, what a great way for international collaboration - learning about each other, working together without crossing physical borders! I would love to connect - it would be great for us to add online component to expand this PD
Susannah O'Shea
Susannah O'Shea
Chemistry Teacher
Ms. Heiderer,
Thank you very much for visiting our video! I viewed your video a few days ago and I was in awe!
I feel that traveling to international countries has been the greatest personal factor in growing professionally as a teacher, so I can only imagine how your students must feel about The Globe Program and how much they must learn.
How are the research projects for The Globe Program chosen each year? Because the students present their findings in a research conference following the international program, does each group present different research?
Mohamed Eldwiny
Good Job and good luck to you all!!
Susannah O'Shea
Souad Outarid
Souad Outarid
Senior Teacher
Thank you, Mohamed.
Susannah O'Shea
Susannah O'Shea
Chemistry Teacher
Mr. Eldwiny,
Thank you so much! We are looking to learn more about other countries' systems and what we can do as educators in NYC to ensure that our students in our classrooms are learning in the most conducive environment.
Souad Outarid
Senior Teacher
Dear Ms. Heiderer,
Thank you, What a wonderful website, amazing job.
Thank you for sharing.
Susannah O'Shea
Sergei Mikhelson
Very interesting project. International perspectives and experience are essential to a better education all over the world.
Susannah O'Shea
Souad Outarid
Souad Outarid
Senior Teacher
Good Afternoon Mikhelson,
Thank you very much for visiting our video! It was truly an amazing experience for us.
Thank you
Susannah O'Shea
Further posting is closed as the showcase has ended.