La Salle Science Teachers Present at CSTA Conference

La Salle Science Teachers Present at CSTA Conference

As I made my way over to the San Jose Convention Center to prepare for my presentation “Low Budget Manipulatives to Improve Teaching Stoichiometry”, I received a text from my daughter,  with a quote from a keynote speaker at a conference she was attending on health reform in New Orleans.  The quote read, “Teachers touch eternity through their students.”

How appropriate that she would send me this quote when I was about to embark on sharing my teaching with a group of teachers who would then hopefully go on to teach their students, thereby allowing me to touch thousands of students through this opportunity.

Over the weekend of October 18^th through the 21^st, La Salle Science teachers attended and presented at the California Science Teachers Association Annual Conference.  The  2012 Conference centered on The Common Core Standards (CCS), Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), Literacy and STEM to Career. 

More than 1,450 workshops were presented for review and 180 were selected for the conference.  For the science teachers at La Salle to present three of the workshops is truly an honor for our department.

Physics teachers Chija Bauer and Kjersti Housman co-presented two workshops: “Inquiry Based Physics Classroom and Standards Based Grading” and “Global Warming Cumulative Project in Physics”  Chemistry teacher Brian Miller and Anthony Ferenades, co-presented “Low Budget Manipulatives to Improve Teaching Stoichiometry”.

It is a wonderful experience to attend association conferences and share ideas and gain new insights into teaching our students.  However, it is a tremendous validation for what we do each and everyday here at La Salle in experiencing the enthusiasm of peers in science education who are excited about we the information we shared and are hopefully energized to carry those methods and concepts back to their own classrooms. 

How great an opportunity to touch the hearts of our own students but also to touch the hearts of those students who will be guided by the teachers who we were fortunate to enough to share our workshops?