Reflection on RET - Sam Perez Mass Bay Community College

The 2009 RET Summer is an awakening. This experience rekindled my love for research. The lab environment and having to work with eager young minds in a two way learning mode was both refreshing and enlightening. Usually in the school year, Im the expert but with this summer experience I am a peer learner with the other BU engineering students. Everybody learns from one another. This experience also propelled me to complete my PhD application for computer science. Hope I get in.
I recommend this program to other teachers who want to rekindle their love for research. For those who may have never experienced a research environment, this is an opportunity to connect to another means of experiencing learning. Of course we have our seminars or conferences, but these tend to be passive learning and research is active learning and one has the opportunity to create knowledge to inform one's teaching.
I think we need to have more than 6 six weeks to do research. 8 weeks would be ideal as some experiments or projects take longer to do. Also the admin housekeeping took some days off from lab time and additional time may be needed.
Also the timing of the lesson presentation should be advanced a bit. The feedback can be used to change some items on the final poster. Having the lesson presentation in the last week might be a bit late already.
I suggest a project management session for future RET teachers. This involves learning MS Project and using it in the lab setting. I am open to teach a session on this for next year. I have taught project management in my college.

Reflections from John Savage - Middlesex Community College

Reflections on the program as a whole: Reflections on the program as a whole:Personally, I was extremely satisfied with my research experience. Although I know it was just a lucky coincidence that my group had a need that met my “expertise from a previous life”, it truly was gratifying to contribute to the group in an immediate and concrete way. I felt more like a post-doc than a grad student. (Maybe it was just my silly bloated ego getting fed, but I’m self aware enough to admit that it felt pretty good). I also want to point out that I didn’t just copy my grad student work. The field of Raman Spectroscopy has integrated new technologies and applications since my research days, so I was able to learn quite a bit of these advances. I hope that, if I am fortunate enough to participate in RET in the future, I would be able to continue the Raman Microscopy work in Professor Gu’s lab.I feel I learned some valuable education theory in the professional development sessions. Unlike the high school teachers, formal education classes are not required for my profession, and therefore much of the vocabulary and even some of the concepts were new to me. This new knowledge will be very helpful in my interaction with colleagues and college administrators who have more formal backgrounds in education. I will also certainly be even more focused than before on developing more inquiry-based lessons. (My colleagues and I already integrate many hands-on and other activities in lieu of traditional lectures; we just didn’t call it “inquiry based learning”.)It was a great pleasure to get to know the high school and middle school teachers. I think that having a better understanding of their working conditions, challenges, and successful strategies will help me to understand my own students’ prior experience. In general, I think that the interaction between us all can only help our ability to shepherd people through the entire 7-16 education process. Whether or not helping a more seamless laddering for our students through the system is an explicit goal of RET, it is certainly a valuable consequence of our participation.Lastly, I’d like to comment on the quality of the people I met and worked with for these past 6 weeks. They are simply exceptional. I leave the program having a great deal of admiration and respect for the job the high school teachers are doing. I hope my son’s teachers in the future are as dedicated, compassionate, and most importantly, competent.I hope we all stay in touch and use this forum as our own learning community, one in which best practices are shared and questions can be comfortably posed.Have a productive and happy school year.John

Reflections on the Research Experience for Teachers (RET) Program 2009

Paul Chanley said...
RET-2009: Final Posting.Fellow colleagues: RET is fabulous and I highly recommend the program. The experience was enlightening and I consider it one of the best professional development opportunities that I have participated in. The people I met are great. And while it is a six week commitment for the summer, I felt it was well worth it. The program allowed me to explore areas I would not have typically been able to get involved in. For example, while working on the boat project at BU, I engaged in the full cycle of the engineering design process. Normally, you focus on only one or two areas of the design process during a professional development experience. In the case at BU, we went from determining the essential question to developing a preliminary design, prototyping, and then working toward the final design and redesign. That is a big accomplishment in a six week time span. Check out the Massachusetts’s Curriculum Frameworks Engineering & Technology “Engineering Design Process.” We experienced the whole process.Paul