Professional Context
Prosser Career Academy is a vocational high school on the Northwest side of Chicago. There are currently 1500 students and they come to Prosser from all parts of the city. I am planning on implementing an extracurricular group for females interested in pursuing a career in STEM or just interested in exploring what they can do with STEM. This group will be meeting either before or after school depending on what works better for students with our new start time this school year. As a math teacher I will also be recruiting from other disciplines (science, vocational, etc…) to help bring ideas to the group.
Big Idea
The ultimate goal of this extracurricular group is to introduce the female students at Prosser to the different careers that they could have in STEM. We have an abundance of females taking AP math and science classes, but they are not given a chance to explore different avenues to use these skills in their careers. One of the most difficult things for myself as a college students was being afraid to try new things because of the fear of failure. My goal is to have a space where girls are encouraged to take risks and failures are celebrated and seen as learning opportunities.
Brief Description
My approach is going to be one of doing, listening, and exploring. My goal is to have the girls lead the way in coming up with the structure of the group. My goal is to tap into the resources that I already have around me from my Mom as a female in a STEM career to the other female teachers at my school. I want to give students plenty of time to do as much exploring as they would like. Math and science can be topics that are frustrating and confusing for students and I want to give them time to “play” with the material they are studying in these classes. I would consider this to be a successful activity if students walked away from this group with a greater appreciation of math and science. My dream group would consist of at least two other female advisors and a core group of twelve students. I really want to draw females from all grade levels to be in this group so we can get leadership from the older students, but also form a core group of females that I can count on to keep the group going into the next year.
Luckily, there are many people that are trying to bring the love of STEM to high school girls and I have different options for how I want to start this program. Some of the different programs that I am going to look into when planning this project are “Brainy Girls”, a magazine that is dedicated to introducing females to careers in STEM, Girls who Code is a group looking to bridge the gap between males and females in the computer science industry and finally starting a GEMS (girls excelling in math and science) club. The GEMS club website has a toolkit available that lays out a plan for implementing a club in schools which may guide my project the most at this time.
Prosser Career Academy is a vocational high school on the Northwest side of Chicago. There are currently 1500 students and they come to Prosser from all parts of the city. I am planning on implementing an extracurricular group for females interested in pursuing a career in STEM or just interested in exploring what they can do with STEM. This group will be meeting either before or after school depending on what works better for students with our new start time this school year. As a math teacher I will also be recruiting from other disciplines (science, vocational, etc…) to help bring ideas to the group.
Big Idea
The ultimate goal of this extracurricular group is to introduce the female students at Prosser to the different careers that they could have in STEM. We have an abundance of females taking AP math and science classes, but they are not given a chance to explore different avenues to use these skills in their careers. One of the most difficult things for myself as a college students was being afraid to try new things because of the fear of failure. My goal is to have a space where girls are encouraged to take risks and failures are celebrated and seen as learning opportunities.
Brief Description
My approach is going to be one of doing, listening, and exploring. My goal is to have the girls lead the way in coming up with the structure of the group. My goal is to tap into the resources that I already have around me from my Mom as a female in a STEM career to the other female teachers at my school. I want to give students plenty of time to do as much exploring as they would like. Math and science can be topics that are frustrating and confusing for students and I want to give them time to “play” with the material they are studying in these classes. I would consider this to be a successful activity if students walked away from this group with a greater appreciation of math and science. My dream group would consist of at least two other female advisors and a core group of twelve students. I really want to draw females from all grade levels to be in this group so we can get leadership from the older students, but also form a core group of females that I can count on to keep the group going into the next year.
Luckily, there are many people that are trying to bring the love of STEM to high school girls and I have different options for how I want to start this program. Some of the different programs that I am going to look into when planning this project are “Brainy Girls”, a magazine that is dedicated to introducing females to careers in STEM, Girls who Code is a group looking to bridge the gap between males and females in the computer science industry and finally starting a GEMS (girls excelling in math and science) club. The GEMS club website has a toolkit available that lays out a plan for implementing a club in schools which may guide my project the most at this time.