Summer registration now open! Courses begin June 12.

Only teachers participating in the Innovation in the Heartland professional development program (SEED grant) in 2019-2020 are eligible to enroll in this course.

NOTE: The graduate credit for this course requires registration with Southern Utah University.

The primary goal of this course is for teacher-participants to increase expertise in fostering innovative problem-solving in their middle school classrooms through STEM education and engineering design.

In this course, participants learn how to develop and facilitate engineering design experiences in their classrooms which promote engineering practices, inquiry-based learning, and content-area learning. Participants use the Design through Inquiry (DTI) Model as a framework for the engineering design experiences, incorporating the 5Es, design thinking, and inquiry-based learning. Related course topics include STEM integration, authentic design challenges, state and national standards, student questioning and defining problems, developing and using models, assessment strategies, and scaffolds to support higher-level thinking and research.  

Required Texts: There are no required texts for this course.

Expected Learning Outcomes.  Teacher-participants will:

• Explore the importance of integrating STEM and promoting engineering practices across content areas
• Implement strategies for helping students ask questions and define the problem in a design challenge
• Develop authentic design challenges which align to standards and promote engineering practices
• Incorporate opportunities for student-developed models into content-area instruction and into engineering design experiences
• Develop a plan for an engineering design experience including standards, assessment, instructional activities, and a realistic set of constraints and measures of success
• Implement an engineering design experience in their classroom
• Design and develop scaffolds for fostering students’ higher level thinking and research-skills
• Design and develop assessment strategies and scaffolds, including a formative assessment schedule, data collection methods, summative assessment plans and rubrics.