ISEE Professional Development Program

Fair warning: this post doesn't have anything to do with Israel. Or the research I will perform while in Israel. But it is a common thread for the majority of the 2017 IRES grad students.

Three of the IRESers this year (Kim, Esra, and myself) hold a position with such distinction that no less than three acronyms are required to contain its power. We are the few. We are the elite. We are the ISEE PDP DTLs.

• ISEE: Pronounced like the slushy drink from 7-Eleven, this stands for Institute for Scientist and Engineer Educators. This is a group at UCSC is focused on developing evidence-based best practices for STEM teaching, and teaching these practices to current and future STEM educators.
• PDP: Professional Development Program. This is a program (largely targeting graduate students) that focuses on teaching inquiry-based teaching strategies. It has a yearly cycle. First, participants attend two workshops. One of these workshops is designed to get participants acquainted with the established concepts for inquiry activities, and the second is focused on allowing participant groups (called "design teams") to design their own activities. After this, teams are expected to prepare for and then facilitate the activity with a group of ~20 undergraduates. After the inquiry activity, design teams are expected to evaluate the effectiveness of the activity using predefined metrics, and suggest improvements.
• DTL: Design Team Leader. Seeing as Kim, Esra and myself have already completed a full cycle of the ISEE PDP, we were asked to return as team leaders. We each proposed the topics we will be developing activities to teach, and manage a group of 2-3 other PDPers during the design process.

Is this what the youths these days are calling a "face-palm"?

The first PDP workshop (the Inquiry Institute) was March 17-21, and the second workshop (Design Institute) starts tomorrow! In fact, one of the main reasons I'm writing this is to procrastinate on the required assignments! I have definitely completed all of my preparation and am ready to go! Esra and myself will be preparing projects for "Research Saturday" at UCSC in October, and Kim's team will be presenting their project at Akamai in Hawaii.

-Steve