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TUSD welcomes the new Director of STEM and Local Accountability, Dean Reese, who will join Educational Services to provide leadership to the continuing efforts to develop STEM in TUSD. This new Educational Services position is another sign of the commitment to STEM in TUSD for all students. Dean brings a wealth of expertise in STEM teaching, directing programs, grant writing, and scholarship at the local, county, and state levels. He will be working with Educational Services Directors, site administrators, the Site Implementation Teams, and the Professional Learning staff, and Curriculum Council and the Math-Science subcommittee to sustain the STEM work in [...]

March 2021 TUSD’s STEM learning in grades PreK-5 continues during distance learning. Teachers attend support meetings for each unit that focus on instructional strategies for distance learning. In addition, design challenge materials in each unit have been modified to be easy to send home so all students can work through each unit’s design challenge. The same instructional strategies and materials are designed to support students who return to face-to-face learning on March 22. In the 2021-22 school year, students in grades 6-12 will begin receiving STEM instruction and design challenges that incorporate computer science and engineering. Students in each grade will [...]

February 2021 Students are well on their way to engaging in STEM for the second semester! Students are engaging in learning focusing on inquiry through questioning, use of sense-making through observations and writing in notebooks, and academic discourse through academic language development. In addition to our STEM units we are seeing students “think like a scientist” through inquiry across the content areas. Below are a few examples of STEM unit student materials to support PreK and Kinder. In addition, we are looking forward to seeing grade 1 Unit Watch Out, grade 2 Unit Playground/Landscape Materials, grade 3 Unit Surviving Tracy Winds, [...]

December 2020 The Pre-K-12 STEM pathway continues to be implemented at nine sites in PreK-5 classrooms. Students take four units a year, which are integrated into the ELA units. TUSD's STEM Coordinator has sent out design challenge materials and made videos to help integrate each unit with an emphasis on science, engineering, and computer science concepts. In December and January, STEM Unit B rolls out and grades 3-5 start training for Scratch computer programming. In the Fall of 2021-22, engineering design challenges will be implemented in grades 6-12 math and science classes. The math and science units are designed by Design [...]

March 2020 In October 2018, TUSD received a $4 million, 5-year grant from the US Department of Education to create and implement PreK-12 core instruction in STEM, with a focus on engineering and computer science, for all students in TUSD. Plans are now in place to expand integrated STEM into grades 6 through 12. The goal is to give students four STEM experiences in each year of grades 6-12 (grade 6 will deliver two). Design teams are needed to design these STEM units starting in June: Grade 6 - 2 science-based STEM units Grade 7 - Science 2 science-based STEM units [...]

December 2019 Community Training and Assistance Center (CTAC), TUSD’s technical assistance partner for STEM in TUSD, is evaluating the progress TUSD has made so far in implementing STEM in PreK-5. Evaluators came out to do focus groups at three of the nine sites implementing STEM instruction (Bohn, Kelly, and Poet-Christian) as well as one of the two comparison sites (Freiler). In the next week, a set of surveys will be posted for teachers, students, site administrators, and parents at the nine STEM-implementation sites to respond to. Please take a few minutes to provide your answers to the survey questions so the [...]

October 2019 In October 2018, TUSD received a $4 million, 5-year grant from the US Department of Education to create and implement PreK-12 core instruction in STEM, with a focus on engineering and computer science, for all students in TUSD. Starting in the Fall of 2019, students in PreK to grade 5 have been engaged in STEM through their new units of study. Now it’s time to expand integrated STEM into grades 6 through 12. The TUSD 6-12 STEM Planning Committee has already begun the work to give input and make recommendations to the PreK-12STEM Pathway Leadership Council about the next [...]