A Personal Story.....

I was in Washington, DC last week at a meeting organized by the National Science Foundation, the agency funding PLC-MAP. Mike Heaney, a program officer at NSF, described the importance of stories when NSF reports to Congress. Well, NSF, do I have a story for you.....

On January 28th, we held the first PLC-MAP seminar. We focused on exploring the nature of authentic inquiry learning using the recent Southeast Asia Tsunami as a theme. As I described in my last blog, the intern teachers are really much more interested in learning strategies to motivate students and manage classrooms. I tried to convince the intern teachers that engaging students in interesting, authentic inquiry really helps solve many of these issues, but I saw many dubious faces.

A mentor teacher, Liane Fleming from Klein ISD, then came to my rescue. She described her own use of the tsunami theme as the basis for inquiry learning in her 8th grade class. She told how her students were captivated when she described her own experience of the tsunami, which she experienced on the back of an elephant. You could have heard a pin drop in the seminar room as the other teachers listened to her story, a perfect example of the potential of inquiry learning.

Image courtesy of KHOU.

I don't know what we did to deserve this, but I could not have asked for a more perfect start for our program.