2024-25 School Year ISB Education Highlights

isbscience.org/news/2024/11/26/2024-25-school-year-isb-education-highlights/

Each month throughout the 2024-2025 academic year, we will highlight some of the top projects the ISB Education team is working on.

November

Dr. Phil Bell and Dr. Deb Morrison were this year’s recipients of the Valerie Logan Leadership in Science Education Award.

Ignite STEM! Thank you to all the friends of ISB Education  

On November 13, ISB held the annual Ignite STEM event to celebrate our education program impacts. At the heart of this evening is the Valerie Logan Leadership in Science Education award. The two awardees for this 11th year are Dr. Phil Bell and Dr. Deb Morrison, honored for their leadership in science ed to the College of Education and for their game-changing set of open-source STEM Teaching Tools. 

We appreciate your help making Ignite STEM a success – we’ve raised over $50,000 to support programs with students and educators this year.

See a collection of photos from the event here, and watch this video of a moving recollection and tribute of a former ISB high school intern, who is now a graduate student working toward her PhD at UC Berkeley.

Next-Gen Bio Learning Network – bringing ISB science to undergrad students

This month, the community college faculty dove deeper into their work for the year when they met with ISB faculty member Dr. Jennifer Hadlock. These biology faculty discussed a variety of topics with Jenn – a highlight was building a vision for course materials to support community college students to better understand how our personal health data is and isn’t protected. 

The group will continue to partner with scientists throughout the year to continue to consider how the volume, velocity, and variety of biological data should be impacting our undergraduate learners. 

LEADS completes its 5th cohort

Leadership Empowerment And Development in STEM (LEADS) 17 “Systems Thinkers in STEM” Ambassadors just completed their program as the  5th cohort of LEADS. This cohort was a hybrid model with four virtual sessions over Zoom and one in-person day onsite at ISB. The ambassadors truly enjoyed exploring STEM careers and various leadership roles and styles throughout the 12-hour program. 

A HUGE thank you to the ISB speakers who joined us during this cohort, Monica Orellana, Samantha Peikos, Jake Valenzuela, Claudia Ludwig, Anna Kuchina and Alice Kane. 

In total, 74 students have completed the LEADS program since its 2022 onset. To learn more about the LEADS program and various other Systems Education Experiences, check out our webpage here.

October

Welcome aboard: We have expanded our team

Faduma Hussein (left) is the newest AmeriCorps member to join ISB. Ethan Brown (right) joins ISB as an Education Assistant thanks to a Dean Witter Foundation grant.

Faduma Hussein recently joined ISB as a Public Health Ambassador Coordinator, and is the fourth AmeriCorps Member to work with our team. In this Q&A, Faduma shares what drew her to ISB, what she hopes to accomplish over the next year, and more. Faduma joins Sarah Clemente, who is now on her second AmeriCorps service term this year. 

Ethan Brown returns to ISB to join our team as an Education Assistant thanks to a grant from the Dean Witter Foundation. Ethan was a 2018 high school intern who helped us launch our Systems Medicine education initiative. We are thrilled to have him return with his advanced skills to further expand the reach and impact of the Systems Medicine 180-hour course.      

Puget Sound LASER Alliance is a science leadership network to support all the school systems in Pierce and King Counties. This partnership is growing to deepen our impacts;  Kirk Robbins (science education consultant) and Drs. Anastasia Sanchez and Kevin Ikeda (Puget Sound Educational Service District) are now joining John Leitzinger and ISB Education to collaboratively lead this regional effort.

Our programs for the 2024/25 school year

We are innovating a new format for “Systems Are Everywhere!” –  one of our popular ClimeTime workshops. The new format uses the Canvas platform, enabling teachers to learn online at their own pace over a four-week series. Teachers try out new strategies and concepts with their students in small steps throughout the series, with coaching from the ISB team and fellow participants.

Our partnership with Central Kitsap School District has entered its third year, and is off to a fast start. Five workshops in a 20-part series are completed, involving all the high school science teachers in the school system. Teachers collaboratively work on strategies targeted at enabling every student to do the “figuring out” of phenomena, so students can uncover and “discover”  key science concepts. 

Presenting our work: Washington Science Teachers Association conference

Three folks from our team – Barb Steffens, Jan Chalupny, and Claudia Ludwig – attended and presented at the annual Washington Science Teachers Association (WSTA) on October 12. This year brought us to Ridgeline High School in the Spokane Valley to work with educators across the state. The team presented and supported these three workshops that introduced teachers to new, hands-on, authentic science experiences designed for high school students:

• Microplastics in the Arctic: Mega Problem?
• A Hands-On Lab to Engage Students in Breast Cancer Research (presented in partnership with our collaborator EmbiTec) 
• Fungus Among Us – Valley Fever Investigation  (led by EmbiTec)

We also connected with other leaders in education including Fred Hutch’s Science Education Partnership and the state’s Office of Superintendent for Public Instruction.