MSMS Faculty Brings Southern Knowledge to Boston at NCSSS
MSMS faculty Lauren Zarandona, Dr. Elizabeth Morgan, Dr.Germain McConnel, and Shae Koenigsberger pose with MSMS Alumni while in Boston for a conference.
November 7, 2016
On Nov. 2-4, MSMS faculty Lauren Zarandona, Shae Koenigsberger, Dr. Elizabeth Morgan, and Dr. Germain McConnell visited Boston, Massachusetts to attend the 2016 National Consortium of Secondary STEM Schools (NCSSS) conference where they brought their Southern knowledge to the bustling North.
The NCSSSis an organization that is designed to “provide a forum for specialized secondary schools focused on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines to exchange information and program ideas,” Koenigsberger explained.
At the conference, Koenigsberger and her fellow teachers sat in on some interesting presentations on the multifaceted topics of teaching at a magnet school like MSMS, and even had the opportunity to perform their own presentations.
Koenigsberger, showing her love for math, recalled a session that she sat in on called “Bring Differential Equations to Life with Data,” calling it “the coolest moment of my career and was almost brought to tears.”
Dr. Morgan, the head of MSMS’s research program, attended many sessions to see how she can further the program.
“My primary goal was to learn about how other schools perform their student research programs,” but that was not the only thing that she learned about. “I also went to one session on drawing and its importance in non-art classes,” Morgan continued.
Morgan went on to say that places like MIT and Google, and their very unique research techniques, have a lot to teach MSMS.
For example, Google’s “Collide and Collaborate” program loosely resembles the lobby area of Hooper, where students have the opportunity to interact with students that they have never had class with, and learn from those who have very different interests than their own.
Besides learning from other sessions, Zarandona and Koenigsberger had the opportunity of spreading their Mississippi knowledge to Boston where they presented two sessions entitled “Get A Clue: Collaborative Problem Solving in Mathematics” and “Digital Storytelling in the Math Classroom”.
These sessions taught other teachers how to execute the colored card problem sets and creative video responses that are common in MSMS math courses.
