Twenty years of EnergyTeachers.org Inc.
Submitted by Shawn Reeves
Originally published: 2024-07-15 08:15:24 Last modified: 2024-07-15 08:16:06
EnergyTeachers.org first twenty years
An article by Shawn Reeves, one of the founders of EnergyTeachers.org Inc., a nonprofit in Massachusetts dedicated to helping teachers all over the world innovate and share curriculum that address society's challenges and develop topics and pedagogies for students not normally interested in the canonical curriculum and pedagogy of physics. This article will list our most significant accomplishments, origins, and visions developed over the past twenty years. We choose to put "accomplishments" before "origins" because they're the reason this organization is notable. We have watched many other organizations come and go. Ours has persevered because we choose to depend on very little money, and we have programmed everything online to be scalable, and this founder, with support from partners, has persevered through the ups and downs of grant funding and waxing and waning interests from different quarters—Also, we occasionally hear "Keep it up, we love the newsletter/guide/workshop/event."
- Accomplishments
- Our Field Trip Guide is our most used resource. Every week teachers use a web search tool to find information for trips to specific sites, and find useful information in our guide. There is no other resource like this on the web. We started it with funding from the Massachusetts electricity rate-payers, creating a colorful book sent to 1396 schools in the state and more distributed at a state science teachers conference. Just one example of the guide's usefulness: Using our Field Trip Guide, our volunteers helped the Inter-American Development Bank find tours of energy-related sites around Baltimore Maryland.
- We developed a non-competitive event with awards called Green Dollhouse Challenge. It is a model of how to have a jury give awards for great accomplishments without competition, something very confusing to those stuck in the debate between "why would students want to do well without competition?" and "gold stars for everyone who participated!" We held events in New York and Massachusetts, awarding honors to participants of all ages who submitted play-structures that involved sustainable features.
- We collaborated with other energy education organizations to create a workshop at National Science Teaching Association about solar cookers.
- We gave a workshop about solar cooking to the American Association of Physics Teachers, to the Massachusetts Association of Science Teachers. Many participants built cookers and wanted to continue the work in their classrooms.
- We have led workshops on teaching electronics circuits.
- We have supplied flicker-checkers to schools to check for old, inefficient ballasts on school lights.
- We contracted to help a middle school create a bike generator safely from an exercise bike.
- We taught teachers to understand the sun's path in the sky over seasons.
- We created an online database for wind data that makes wind roses, rarely seen but useful graphs for understanding statistics about wind direction and speed, useful both for navigation and for wind power prediction.
- We host curriculum resources from a popular energy education organization that shuttered when its parent organization re-prioritized away from education.
- We helped a high school teacher select electronics kits for a grant proposal.
- We created an Energy Haiku online project for teachers and students.
- We exhibited solar cookers and thermal cameras at a large city science festival.
- We have sponsored multiple meetings of the New England Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers.
- We have sponsored the Ithaca Physics Bus, who runs science and engineering outreach programs.
- We organized eclipse viewing of the April 2024 eclipse at a youth center.
- We participated in many school district science fairs.
- We compiled an online bibliography of 270 books and articles relevant to teaching energy and electronics.
- We host a library of hundreds of books, journals, lab equipment, and other resources available to teachers that visit our office.
- We have an online bulletin board where teachers post questions about teaching about energy or electronics.
- We list thousands of links organized in hundreds of topics useful to teachers. We monitor which links teachers actually click, making sure to update them.
- We've mailed 21 newsletters to hundreds of no-fee subscribers, thanks in part to a fund by Massachusetts rate-payers.
- We maintain an energy education demonstration lab in the virtual world Second Life that thousands have seen, and where we have offered many workshops for educators and for the general public to understand about sustainable energy.
- We helped train middle school teachers to run Junior Solar Sprint, where students build shoe-box sized solar cars to race down a 20m track.
- We helped judge Clean Energy awards at Massachusetts science fairs.
- We collaborated with longstanding energy education organization SolarNow under contract to help Dedham Public Schools plan to teach using its new sustainably powered middle school.
- We collaborated with KidWind on developing lab equipment.
- We helped plan a Green STEM conference for Massachusetts science teachers.
- Origins
- In 1997 Shawn Reeves, a student of the history and sociology of physics, earned a master's degree in curriculum and instruction from Cornell University, culminating in an oral review of a project on helping New York State physics teachers find online and other resources for teaching about solar power in light of new statewide math, science, and technology standards.
- In 2003, Shawn attended his first conference of the American Association of Physics Teachers, where he attended workshops, sessions, and a cracker-barrel all about teaching about models of energy production and use. Resources were shared there by Richard Tarara of Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana; Pat Keefe of Clatsop Community College in Astoria Oregon; Gregory Mulder of Linn-Benton Community College in Albany, Oregon; Kevin Little of Informing Ecological Design LLC; and John L. Roeder of The Calhoun School New York New York, among many others. Shawn immediately began work assembling resources related to teaching about energy on a web site. The names mentioned, and so many others, provided many resources and much helpful support these twenty years.
- In 2004, Shawn attended his first conference of the New England Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers, meeting Stephen Cremer. The two decided to form a nonprofit corporation, forming a board of three with fellow chemistry teacher Beth Bounds. The corporation "EnergyTeachers.org Inc." was formed in Massachusetts, and quickly received IRS 501(c)(3) status.
- The website began listing and answering questions teachers might have about how to develop curriculum. This project was called "Teachers Goals," answering questions about goals like "Groups and Activism: How can students improve the school building?" and "Laboratories and Experiments: Can we model efficiency measures?"
- From 2005 to 2007, the organization received a $40,000 grant from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, administrator of the Renewable Energy Trust, a fund paid by electric utility customers. With the money, ETO published a newsletter, postcards, and field trip guide; attended conferences; and developed a scalable web site full of curriculum resources for teachers.
- In 2019 informal education expert and Ithaca Physics Bus founder Erik Herman joined the board of directors.
- Our online resources and some projects like Green Dollhouse Challenge, Energy Haiku, and Wind Roses were programmed from the beginning to be easily scalable at little or no cost. Almost the entire website has always been dynamic, interconnected pages based on a robust database. For example, any workshop listing, for our own workshops or for other organizations' workshops, can include links to topics which then link to other workshops, links, projects, news articles, resources, etc.
- Visions
- Our Green Dollhouse Challenge, with its Organizer Guide shared on request, models a way to run a special event with non-competitive, standards-based awards. We would like to help other organizations develop new challenges, or convert old competitions, to events that honor absolute achievement rather than relative rank.
- Our Field Trip Guide has been expanding to include all educational field trips, since no such general database exists for teachers. We would like to include more than the current ten nations, and provide resources to teachers in all geographical areas of those nations.
- We would like to host workshops for teachers at our office.
- We would like to continue to be invited to give workshops at educational sites.
- We would like to hear more about educational field trips that teachers are leading.
- We would like to collaborate with researchers to find out what teachers need most in terms of curriculum ideas, curriculum planning questions, and other scanty resources.
Related Links
Related Documents
- ETO Newsletter 2005 September
- ETONewsletterSep2005.pdf
- The printed newsletter in September, 2005, included an article about the Hands On Boat Based Education and Science Program, two resources from MTC's Guide to Teaching Renewable Energy, and some of the announcements found here and in the Calendar.
- Green Dollhouse Challenge Oct 2010 workshop notes
- GreenDollhouseChallengeWorkshop20101029.pdf
- Written by Shawn Reeves, to spur discussion among NYS STEM teachers about how to start the Green Dollhouse Challenge.
- Sample KSYR Wind data analysis
- KSYR-WindEnergy2008.pdf
- A simple analysis of hourly wind data from Syracuse Airport (SYR).
- Winter 2004-2005 ETO Newsletter
- ETO-Winter-2004-2005-Newsletter.pdf
- Late edition of the December 2004 through February 2005 newsletter of EnergyTeachers.org. Sent to about 500 high schools across MA and southeastern NH. It includes articles and notes about the website, education-notes from the MA Renewable Energy Trust, fresh ideas, a nod to the bibliography, and future events.