Pat Parent from Massabesic Middle School in Waterboro and 100+ other teachers from across Maine are connecting their students to the Vital Signs community.
I really want my students to step up as citizen scientists and show a good effort the first time by learning from my blunders and what good evidence might look like."
Pat Parent, Massabesic Middle School
Since his start in 2009, Pat continues to push Vital Signs limits, showing us new and different ways to make the program hum with students. Pat often puts himself on the line, challenging students to critique his own observations and learn from his "mistakes." In the summertime, Pat takes Vital Signs on the road to his retreat in northern Maine. A slow and unreliable Internet connection in the woods doesn't stop him from putting model observations and science notebook entries on the site!
Teachers like Pat are at the heart of the Vital Signs community. They are our window into classrooms and local communities statewide. Their tireless work to educate and motivate Maine’s next generation of active, participatory citizens does not go unnoticed here.
Teachers participate and contribute to Vital Signs in a number of ways, including:
2. Creating authentic, inquiry-based learning environments that promote the development of 21st century skills.
3. Adapting and modifying Vital Signs content in creative ways to make it relevant to local habitats, student interests, and local issues.
4. Guiding, facilitating, and motivating day-to-day student learning, data collection, community participation, and creative project development.
5. Contributing their own best practices to discussion forums to be soaked up by colleagues statewide.
6. Sharing original lesson plans and modified curriculum resources in the Open Resource Exchange for colleagues to use and adapt in their classrooms.
7. Collecting their own data as citizen scientists, and keeping an annual watch on the native and invasive species in their area.
Currently there are 100 teachers active in the Vital Signs community, with more joining us in 2011. Fourteen of our teachers were instrumental in advising and testing the development of Vital Signs to ensure its success in middle school classrooms statewide.
Contact us if you are interested in connecting your classroom with the Vital Signs community.
Mike Denniston, Middle School of the Kennebunks
The future will be bright if our students become responsible, contributing members of our society, with an understanding that our ecosystems are complex and fragile.
Mike Denniston, 7th grade Science, Middle School of the Kennebunks
Mike and his seventh grade students have been doing their own long-term ecological research investigation into the health of local rivers. They have macroinvertebrate bioassessment data dating back to 1999 from Branch Brook, Kennebunk River, and Mousam River that tell quite an interesting an important story. Mike has adopted Vital Signs as a way to make this investigation and the science he teaches more real, meaningful, and connected.
"I have been teaching for 36 years and Vital Signs has proven to be one of the best programs I have been involved with."
