Contact Us

    SMTC

    Office Hours:

    Mon-Fri 8:00 - 5:00 (School Year)

    Mon-Fri 7:30 - 4:30 (Summer)

    1000 E. University Ave.

    Dept. 4320

    242 Hill Hall

    Laramie, WY 82071

    Phone: 307.766.6381

    Email: smtc@uwyo.edu

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    News & Events in the SMTC

    SMTC Team in the News: 

    The science PD team has worked with teachers in Saratoga, Encampment, and Hanna for the past couple of years on digital lab tools to help them support absent students' continued science learning. The NGSS NOW newsletter recently shared these teachers' work (see #4!)! You can also see some more about this work on our PD team's page.

    A faculty member at Clemson University recently shared some of our science PD team's work on his substack about rural education! He shared our article, which documents work our team did with our college of education colleague Dr. Mark Perkins and former graduate student Angus McReynolds, as an example of an approach to engage rural teachers in virtual PD.

    Spring 2023 SMTC Graduates:

    smtc spring 2023 graduates

    Wyoming Teachers: 

    Photo of teachers at NTSA Kansas City

    Sweetwater County School District #2 teachers (left to right: Rick Carrol, Assistant Principal – Jacob Gantz, Megan Allen, Shawna Mattson, Katie Camis, and Matt Freze) presented about their work around science teaching and learning at the National Science Teaching Association’s national conference held in Kansas City, KS in October 2023. The science teachers at Green River High School and Expedition Academy in Green River, Wyoming, have been working together since 2017 to shift their courses to the student-centered, phenomenon-driven, and place-based vision of the Wyoming Science Standards. They’ve made gratifying strides toward supporting student success, including a dramatic increase in student WY-TOPP performance.

    Most recently, they have turned their attention to writing learning targets and success criteria for their classrooms that preserve opportunities for students to authentically use science practices to figure out science ideas and problems. Like many other teachers and administrators across the nation, these teachers struggled with learning target and success criteria expectations because they are often written in ways that give away the “so what” of students’ investigations and learning. They worked together to reimagine how these targets and criteria could look in the science classroom, and how they could root the statements in the standards to support students’ deep learning. In their Kansas City presentation, titled “Do You Hate Writing Learning Targets? So DID We Until We Made them Work for Science,” the teachers were met with an enthusiastic group of attendees from New York, Arizona, New Jersey, and more states, who expressed gratitude to the Green River for sharing ideas and processes that would help them work through the same problems in their own schools and districts.

    SMTC Graduate Students:

    Photo looking up through the canopy of a Peruvian forest with multiple plant types; blue sky is visible among the leaves, branches, vines, and trunks.

    (Daniel Laughlin photo housed on Global Vegetation Project platform)

    A recent university press release shouts out SMTC graduate student in the Natural Science Education master's degree program, Matt Bisk, and his work with the Global Vegetation ProjectThis is an excellent example of cross-disciplinary and cross-campus collaboration between the Biodiversity Institute (providing the funding for Matt's graduate assistantship position), Daniel Laughlin and his Lab (associate professor in Botany and Director of the Global Vegetation Project), the National Science Foundation (proving funding for the project), and the SMTC, particularly our Professional Development Team (Martha Inouye, Clare Gunshenan and Ana Houseal) experts in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and the use of phenomenon-based learning, who are supporting Matt in the development of these resources so they align with the Standards and the current needs of science teachers throughout the country and around the world. These resources should be very useful to educators everywhere and should encourage them to add to the gVeg database, too.

    Recent Defenses:

    congratulations to erica ballou

    congratulations to abbey matre

     

    Contact Us

    SMTC

    Office Hours:

    Mon-Fri 8:00 - 5:00 (School Year)

    Mon-Fri 7:30 - 4:30 (Summer)

    1000 E. University Ave.

    Dept. 4320

    242 Hill Hall

    Laramie, WY 82071

    Phone: 307.766.6381

    Email: smtc@uwyo.edu

    Find us on Facebook (Link opens a new window)