I recently had the opportunity to attend the 2019 national NSTA conference in St. Louis. NSTA stands for the National Science Teachers Association. It's a great organization and the conferences they put on are excellent! I've attended in the past, but can't go every year. In fact, I've only attended 3 of the last 13 years, although I've made it each of the last 2. The reason is funding. If you haven't noticed, schools are drastically under-funded by the states and it's hard to go to one of these conferences without appropriate funding
This year's conference was held in St. Louis, and I made sure to find some time to do a bit of site-seeing. I'll share some of these site-seeing adventures in future posts. At the conference I focused on attending sessions that were less science content based and more focused on equality in the classroom. I attended some fantastic sessions on gender, race, and LGBTQ+ equality in the classroom. I've always tried my best to be an ally in the classroom, but there is always more for everyone to learn. I picked up a few great ideas from these sessions to apply in my classes.
I also attended a couple of sessions on the growing rate of science denial in this country. Very sad and depressing, but these sessions provided help on how to combat this in the classroom and in the local community.
If you are a science teacher out there, particularly at the K-12 level, I highly encourage you to attend a NSTA annual conference. There are also smaller, regional conferences if those work out better for you. You can learn more about NSTA here:
National Science Teachers Association
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