On Thursday, September 2nd 2010, teachers at Freeland High School were busy preparing for the new school year. They were readying their classrooms, participating in meetings, and thinking about the challenges the coming year would bring. And on that same day, four of the school’s science teachers were experiencing a special, first-of-its-kind training session – they were the very first high school teachers to participate in an Energy Works Michigan professional development workshop.
Bob Peterson and Andrew Hoffman test the blades on their model wind turbine.
Freeland High School is one of the K-12 schools statewide participating in the Michigan Renewable Schools Program (MRSP). As an MRSP partner school, Freeland is having a pair of solar photovoltaic arrays installed in front of the high school building, which will have a combined capacity of 10kW. And in order to really make energy education a part of the school community, Energy Works provides professional development for teachers so that they can learn hands-on methods for teaching energy in the classroom.
Laura Holladay and Courtney Peterson are educators on the Energy Works
staff, and they made the trip to Freeland on that rainy Thursday morning
to spend an entire day with some of Freeland’s science teachers. Laura
and Courtney showed them lessons about energy efficiency, solar
photovoltaics, and wind energy, and they provided each teacher with a
binder full of lesson plans they can use to engage their students in
these topics. The school was also given an Energy Laboratory Kit which
included watt meters, small solar photovoltaic panels, and other
equipment for the teachers to use – during the course of the workshop,
the teachers learned how to lead their students in a classroom energy
audit, how to test different variables of blade design on a model wind
turbine, and how to conduct experiments to find the optimal position for
a solar photovoltaic panel. The weather even cleared in the afternoon,
allowing them to do some of the solar photovoltaic testing outdoors.
Bob Peterson teaches physics at Freeland, and he was very excited about the Energy Works workshop. He is hoping to use the school’s new solar photovoltaic arrays as teaching tools in his physics classes this year, and so he appreciated having additional lesson plans and materials to work with. Andrew Hoffman is a new science teacher at the school, and he hopes to try out some of the Energy Works lessons with his physics students as well. And it turns out that some Freeland’s science teachers were already teaching about energy issues, even before the Energy Works workshop. Tom Short teaches Advanced Chemistry, and he started an alternative fuels program with his students last year. The students are learning to create biodiesel from their own cafeteria’s waste cooking oil, and they are hoping to run some of the vehicles in their school’s fleet using the biodiesel that they make this year. Another Freeland teacher, Jason Robinson, had taught an elective class on Environmental Science during the 2009-10 school year, and Jason spoke up during the Energy Works presentation to say, “That was cool. I wish we had this last year!”
Freeland High School teachers Tom Short and Jason Robinson check the output of a 3-volt solar photovoltaic panel during their Energy Works Michigan professional development workshop.
The feedback that the Energy Works education team gets from schools in their Pilot Testing phase, like Freeland, will help them to refine and improve their workshops, and Laura and Courtney are looking forward to bringing these exciting workshops to hundreds of other teachers. They will be traveling across the state of Michigan this fall and winter in order to offer professional development workshops like this to teachers at all of the K-12 schools participating in the Michigan Renewable Schools Program.