Janet serves as the Associate Director of K-12 Engineering Education for the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. Involved since 2000, she collaborates on the College's ambitious K-12 engineering initiatives, including their capacity-building and school partnership programs. She coordinates the Integrated Teaching and Learning Program's NSF-funded TEAMS Program (Tomorrow's Engineers.. . creAte. iMagine. Succeed.) which engages more than 2,200 K-12 students in engineering throughout the academic year and summer months. She is also a contributing curriculum writer and editor for the TeachEngineering digital library, also an NSF-funded project. Janet holds a B.A. in Communication from CU-Boulder and is currently pursuing a master's degree in Information and Learning Technology at CU-Denver.
Teachers are accountable for progressively higher expectations of performance in their classrooms. With the addition of standards-based teaching and performance testing, today's teachers feel the pressure of implementing quality lessons and curricular units in the classroom within strict time constraints. Not only is the number of qualified teachers in short supply, often they are expected to teach subjects outside their area of primary preparation. Teachers in science and technology classrooms, especially at the elementary and middle school levels, regularly report a lack of confidence in their ability to teach those subjects and seek content-specific professional development opportunities to enhance their classroom success. Supported by National Science Foundation and Department of Education grants, the Integrated Teaching and Learning Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder has worked with K-12 teachers for six years to integrate engineering into their science curricula by offering varied professional development models. Most recently, we explored a model that built upon former workshops and incorporated new ideas. The new workshop format combines the talents of university professors, engineering outreach staff and K-12 teachers, and uses already-developed engineering curricula to support two-day teacher workshops in which teachers teach peer teachers hands-on engineering curricula. Working with university faculty content experts, the teachers use their own pedagogical knowledge to aid their content learning and overcome apprehensions associated with the prospect of teaching engineering in their classrooms. Comprehensive hands-on K-12 engineering curricular units, comprised of multiple stand-alone lessons, form the backbone of the teacher workshop offerings. Teachers benefit by having a tested set of standards-based curricula to take back into their classrooms, coupled with the confidence of having learned how to teach the content. The university K-12 Engineering Program benefits from observing the lesson plan presentations made by the teachers during the workshop and incorporating the teachers' suggestions to improve the curriculum.
College of Engineering and Applied Science. A former high school and middle school science and math teacher, she has advanced degrees in teaching secondary science from the Johns Hopkins University and in civil engineering from CU, Boulder. She is also a First-year Engineering Projects Instructor and on the development team for the TeachEngineering.org digital library. Her primary research interests are on the impacts of project-based service-learning on student identity, recruitment, and retention in K-12 and undergraduate engineering.
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