Professional Development

Professional Development Experience For Educators

Learn the latest science behind earthquakes, Earth strucutre, and plate tectonics!

Learn new pedigogical approaches (e.g. argumentation, modeling, etc)

Learn new classroom activities by participating in hands-on activities that can be used in your classroom!

Obtain materials, maps, curriculum guides, access to data, and books!

In an IRIS Professional Development Workshop participants will be encouraged to become engaged with the content and materials.......

  • as an active participant learning through demonstrations, computer modeling, and hands-on activities.
  • as an educator , aware of how your students will interact with the materials and activities, and
  • as an peer , providing feedback and suggestions to the presenters and the other participants.

Topics covered include: causes of earthquakes, earthquakes and plate tectonics, propagation of seismic waves, seismographs, earthquake locations, statistics and seismology data, Earth's interior structure, earthquake hazards and local seismicity

Schedule

  See upcoming IRIS Education and Outreach Events 

Sample Agendas

If you would like more details on a session, there are two sample agendas below.

Professional Development Philosophy

The IRIS Consortium is committed to increasing educators "comfort" in their classroom by providing professional development experiences which,

  • increases an educator's knowledge of scientific content,
  • provides educators with a variety of high-quality, scientifically accurate activities to deliver content to students, and
  • provides educators with experiences involving both scientific content as well as the educational activities as the primary means of knowledge transfer. (Modeling effective pedagogy)

Customized Professional Development

If you can't catch us at a regional and national teacher conference, we can come to you! IRIS also offers customized content and pedagogical professional development for schools, school districts and a wide variety of professional meetings and conferences.  If you are interested in learning more about how IRIS can help your middle school teachers or high school Earth science/physics teachers, please contact Michael Hubenthal, Science Education Specialist at hubenth "at" iris.edu or 607-777-4612. Cost sharing is generally available. 

Example partners include; Yuma Union Hight School District, Delaware-Chenango-Madison-Otsego Board of Cooperative Educational Services (NY BOCES), Region XIII Education Service Center (TX), and North Carolina A&T State - Physics department.