Brownbag Talks

Would you like to be a part of the TXESS Revolution?

Katherine Ellins
UTIG Project Manager
Geoscience Education

SEMINAR OVERIEW:

This week, Kathy Ellins, UTIG Project Manager, will introduce the TXESS Revolution Project, a $2.38 Million program to fund a rigorous, 5-year geoscience professional development program for 8th - 12^th grade minority-serving science teachers and teacher mentors in Texas. Kathy will offer ways in which interested researchers can contribute to TXESS or use it as a vehicle for their own project outreach to address the "broader impact" element of proposals to federal funding agencies.

ABOUT THE TXESS PROJECT:

The National Science Foundation's Opportunities to Enhance Diversity in the Geosciences, the Shell Oil Company and the Jackson School of Geosciences are together providing $2.38 million to fund the Texas Earth and Space Science (TXESS) Revolution, a rigorous, high-quality, 5-year geoscience professional development program for 8th  12th grade minority-serving science teachers and teacher mentors in Texas. Led by
Dean Eric Barron and Kathy Ellins, The Jackson School is teaming up with the Texas Regional Collaboratives for Excellence in Science and Mathematics Teaching, the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at UT-Austin, TERC (a not-for-profit company in Massachusetts with 30 years experience in designing science curriculum), the University of South Florida, and GeoFORCE Texas to carry out the project. The goal is to prepare teachers for Texas' new capstone Earth and Space Science (ESS) course. Texas has a minority school-age population of over 50%, thus the TXESS Revolution project has the potential to impact hundreds of thousands of minority students over many years.

Key elements of the TXESS Revolution include eight different professional development academies offered twice over two years to two cohorts of teachers and teachers mentors; immersive summer institutes that will consist of  classroom activities aligned with the Texas educational standards for the new capstone course, field experiences in Alaska and Texas, and a Petroleum Science and Technology Institute; training on how to implement Earth Science by Design, an innovative program of professional development for teachers developed by TERC and the American Geological Institute with NSF funding; and an online learning forum designed to keep teachers and teacher mentors in contact with facilitators and fellow project-participants between and after training, and to share best practices, and new information.