(left to right) Ana Rodriguez, Ramona Dinger, and Debbie LeAnce at the NSTA Conference in San Francisco

"My goal for attending the NTSA conference was to start gaining knowledge in science so that I can then begin closing the gap between math and science in the minds of my students. By attending NTSA conference, I came out with a deep interest for merging more science into my math lessons and activities. It is important for students to understand how math transfers to real world applications, and science is one of the easiest ways to do that. Math and science go together like peanut butter and jelly!

I came away from the conference with tools, information, and contacts with science professionals and scientists that will assist me in hands-on activities and lessons that will make teaching across the curriculum more fun and engaging for both me and my math students."  -Ramona Dinger

"One of my favorite sessions I attended was about the science in the sourdough bread that makes San Fransisco famous. In the session, I learned about the history of bread and sourdough bread in particular, even down to the story of the San Fransisco earthquake where the "mother dough" of San Fransisco's sourdough was apparently "saved" from a burning building and still used today.

From this example, I have taught my students about the fermentation of yeast involved in breadmaking, and the particular bacteria who play roles in the creation of just exactly making "sourdough" bread, varying on all of environmental conditions found in the city. We are planning with our Culinary Arts department about when we will share a lab day in their kitchen and allow students to perform a hands on and tasty science experiment at virtually no cost or expensive set ups. "  -Debbie LeAnce

"The NSTA conference in San Francisco motivated me to present a science session as a TIIP team. I found that many of the teachers presenting workshops belonged to schools that have a very different student population than the urban public school that I teach in.

Many of the sessions I attended were given by teachers that had a small class size and belonged to schools where students had to be admitted to attend. I wanted to see more hands on activities for English Learners. There were a few hands on activities by after school program teachers that used simple everyday objects to build Physics projects. I used some of these ideas in my physics classes, and I found them to be highly motivating for students and not too costly for me. " -Ana Rodriguez

Overall, our team found many useful resources at this conference. We actually had to buy a new piece of luggage just to cart back all of our class sets of activities and labs we all acquired as attendees to the conference.

We learned new skills, how to carry out and conduct labs that we previously hadn't done or lacked expertise in conducting.

But on top of all this, we found that one of our most valuable resources as a team comes from having time outside of the classroom together as colleagues, where we are relaxed and find ourselves in a very different climate and setting for collaborating with each other with our various struggles and challenges in the classroom, sharing lesson ideas, building common units together, and so on.

Our TIIP team of teachers rely on each other for building our professional identities, both as we seek outside ourselves for new information and as we turn to each other for growth.