MMTP provides MPS teachers the tools for success

Unlike most teachers, Kevin Schiebenes is excited that his students are experimenting with nicotine – and pesticides, caffeine, alcohol, and lead.

Schiebenes is an environmental sciences teacher at Alexander Hamilton High School, where he’s in the middle of teaching a brandnew Environmental Health course. The class examines the effects of different contaminants on various fauna’s behavior, embryonic development, and learning and memory.

“We started out looking at nicotine and talking about the increase of vaping and the perception that it can be safer than cigarettes,” Schiebenes said. “We used that as a jumping- off point to investigate the effects of nicotine on development and seeing how it actually affects the growing embryo of a zebrafish.”

(If you’re curious, it leads to increased mortality rates in zebrafish embryos, and those that survive are often born with deformities.)

“It’s the first year of this course and it’s going really well,” Schiebenes added. “The students have a lot of time to explore the topics. We focused on investigative skills. We look at background research a lot more.”

The course was designed that way, with the help of the UWM’s Milwaukee Master Teacher Partnership.

Badges and microcredentials

MMTP is a collaboration between UWM’s School of Education, the university’s science faculty, and the Milwaukee Public Schools system. Designed to help MPS math and science high school teachers improve various aspects of their classroom practice, the project allows educators to focus on earning “badges,” or microcredentials, related various aspects of pedagogy and math and science content. They cover everything from fostering student engagement to curriculum development.

“The microcredentials our team developed discuss a variety of instructional practices in the context of math and science instruction. MMTP participants then take these practices into their classroom, implementing and strategically analyzing an instructional unit they designed,” explained UWM assistant professor of chemistry Anja Blecking.

She’s one of the co-principal investigators of MMTP, tasked with helping the 24 participating math and science MPS teachers achieve their badges. That involves meeting with all of the teachers periodically throughout the year to discuss new research, working with small groups of teachers who are working toward the same microcredential, and meeting one-onone to help educators implement their new strategies in the classroom.

Anja Blecking, UWM assistant professor of chemistry

“Right now, I’m working with science teachers on a microcredential that focuses on the implementation of inquiry-based lessons. Research supports the effectiveness of student-centered practices which, as a consequence, requires teachers to rethink their role in the classroom,” Blecking said. “We need to let students develop a sense of ownership in their learning.”

That’s one of Schiebenes’ goals for the new Environmental Health class. The idea for the course grew out of another UWM program for science teachers called Wisconsin Inquirybased Science Teacher Education program. Schiebenes enjoyed working with similar course modules in WInSTEP, but wanted to give students more time to explore and experiment on their own.

How fortunate, then, that he was working on his curriculum development badge and could receive guidance from UWM faculty to link the four WInSTEP modules into a new science class. Now, Alexander Hamilton High School offers three sections of the class, and Rufus King High School also offers one section.

“The students hopefully become independent inquirers of the world where they can ask their own questions, tell the teacher what resources they need, justify the parameters of their experiment, conduct their experiment and make meaning of it, and explain how it fits in to what we already know about the world,” Schiebenes said.

The benefits of a partnership

The MMTP is three years into its five years of funding, and it’s already yielded results for both the participating teachers and their students.

Mike Steele from UWM’s School of Education, one of the co-principal investigators who runs the MMTP program, works with a group of Milwaukee Public Schools teachers at an MMTP training session. UWM Photo.

“The overall goal is, of course, to increase positive student outcome. Better prepared, more confident teachers have a positive effect on student learning,” Blecking said. “It’s sometimes not easy, though, to measure changes in student outcome, especially with (classes changing) each year. But every year we videotape program participants in the classroom, and we do see improvement in their practices, and also in student engagement and learning.”

For Schiebenes, the program has helped him refine and evolve his own teaching methods.

“It caused me to be more reflective of my practice and refine my skills, and look for new and exciting ways of delivering content and evaluating myself to ensure I’m doing it in the best way possible,” he said.

Many of the educators have presented research they completed for their microcredentialing at national conferences. Blecking accompanied science teacher Cynthia Blaser to the Biennial Conference on Chemical Education this summer so she could present her research, for instance.

“MMTP is a true collaboration,” Blecking said. “It is a researchbased professional development program that empowers MPS teachers and students.”

By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science