Feature

Project TESAL

Empowering Teachers through Engineering Design

Project TESAL, which stands for Teachers Engaged in STEM and Literacy, was devised by Bolyard, Curtis and Cairns in partnership with RESA III, the West Virginia Regional Education and Service Agency based in Kanawha County. Sponsored by the West Virginia Math-Science Partnership, Project TESAL provides teachers with hands-on workshops that demonstrate the utility of engineering design projects in math and science classrooms.

“We give the teachers engineering design lessons, so they first experience the concept as learners,” Curtis said. “Then, they start developing engineering design lessons on their own that they would use with their students.”

For the teachers, all from schools served by RESA III, Project TESAL is more than just a professional development workshop; it’s an opportunity to become learners in their own right.

Teachers as Students

The concept of turning teachers into students, integral to Project TESAL, is what differentiates the program from traditional teacher training sessions. Rather than just writing lesson plans, the teachers experience engineering design lessons firsthand to better understand the challenges.

“I thought initially that this was going to be about me writing lessons, but instead, it’s so much more about me learning,” said Maureen Miller, an eighth-grade science teacher at Hurricane Middle School in Hurricane, W.Va. “It’s a different kind of professional development.”

During the program’s three-year run, the teachers have learned about the engineering design process by constructing paper roller coasters, gingerbread houses, and most recently, wind turbines.

This July, the teachers huddled in groups around their wind turbines, built with inexpensive materials that they brought from home. They were provided with few instructions for completing the assignment and were given only a small motor for use in the construction process.

“It’s something that you want to work on; you don’t want to stop,” said Jessica Phillips, a sixth-grade mathematics teacher at Sissonville Middle School in Sissonville, W.Va. “I kind of know how my students feel in the classroom when they’re designing things. They get excited about it.”

In addition to learning as their students would, participants in Project TESAL are given the tools they need to strengthen their content-area knowledge in math and science, and more specifically, their understanding of the engineering design process.

According to Curtis, the engineering design process encourages learners to identify a challenge or problem to solve. Once they’ve identified the problem, learners figure out what they might build to solve it, build that object and test it. If the first design fails, they rebuild the object and try again, repeating the process until they have a working solution.

“We’re giving the teachers a model, not only of creating engineering design lessons to integrate math, science and literacy, but also using those as ways to identify content-area gaps in their students,” Curtis said.

Bridging the Gap

Beyond enhancing their mastery of the design process, Project TESAL’s participants are encouraged to collaborate on lesson plans that bridge the gap between math and science. Using engineering design principles, the teachers integrate the subjects in ways that are meaningful to students.

“It’s important to help the students bridge those connections between what they do in math and how they apply it in science, between the data they collect in science and how they can analyze it in math,” Miller said.

Tanesa Bowman, who has taught seventh-grade science at Horace Mann Middle School in Charleston, W.Va. for three years, has created multiple engineering design lessons that have allowed her students to see the connections in their math and science coursework.

For one lesson, Bowman gave her students cornstarch, water and a golf ball. She told them to combine the cornstarch and water in a cup so the golf ball would sit on top of the mixture before sinking to the bottom. However, the mixture was not allowed to be so thick that it couldn’t be poured easily from one cup to another.

“They got to see the engineering side of things because they had to work through trial and error,” Bowman said. “They had to be good at precise measurements and record-taking.”

After completing the activity, Bowman’s students took the data to their math classes to calculate the proportion of cornstarch to water and compare with other groups. The idea was that students could have had different recipes, but the ratio of cornstarch to water might be the same for each group.

Creating opportunities for cross-curricular connections benefits the students, but it benefits the teachers, too. Because the teachers who participate in Project TESAL come from different content areas, they’re able to use the workshop as a time to brainstorm ways to make the relationship between math and science seamless for their students.

“It’s nice to work with people and to see how a project would be used in a science classroom versus a math classroom,” Phillips said.

Regardless of the project, the engineering design assignments have been an effective means of engaging students in the learning process and making lessons memorable and meaningful.

“Whenever I ask my students about some of their favorite things in their sixth-grade year, they’ll always bring up one of the design projects we did,” Phillips said. “It really does stick with them, and I think it is something that they’ll always remember.”

Enthusiasm for Engineering

Data regarding student test scores in statewide science and math exams after the programs is not yet available, but the teachers report higher student engagement in classroom activities and positive responses to the independent thinking fostered by engineering design.

“When I do more traditional labs, I often get carbon-copy answers,” Bowman said. “With the engineering lessons, I get so much more creativity. I get to see the kids figuring things out for themselves instead of me leading them to the answers.”

Miller also claimed that her students were more likely to pursue advanced science courses in high school.

“I see that, as they go to the high school, they become more involved in taking more science classes, taking harder science classes in terms of honors or AP,” Miller said. “The teachers in high school tell me that the students who have had me are always well-prepared for those classes.”

Though Project TESAL concluded in the summer of 2017, the program’s impact will continue as the participating teachers implement engineering design in their math and science lessons, further engaging their students with the hope of interesting them in STEM careers. The new concepts they learned over the three-year period have changed their classrooms and changed them as teachers.

“It just gives you a fresher, new perspective on teaching and gets you pumped as a teacher,” Phillips said. “This program really did take me out of my comfort zone, and I think it’s allowed me to take my students a little bit further in math and science than what I have before.”