The IslandWood-UW Collaboration

The College of Education is fortunate to partner with IslandWood, one of our region’s most dynamic environmental education institutions. Each year, IslandWood enrolls a number of graduate students (you) who take courses and work with the hundreds of elementary age students who come to learn more about the environment and their role in environmental stewardship. At the end of the year-long program, you have the option of continuing on in your studies at the University of Washington for a master’s degree. You have 2 study options from which to choose: Science Education or Teaching and Curriculum.

This document explains this relationship, but please note that it does NOT take the place of official documents produced by the College of Education (COE) that describe the requirements of the Masters in Education (MEd). You must read and follow all the official documents of the COE, particularly the Core Requirements document on the TLC web site (Teaching, Learning and Curriculum, i.e. your home area in the College): http://education.uw.edu/my-coe/current-students/degree-info/master-education/program-requirements. Some, but not all the courses you have taken at IslandWood fulfill requirements of these two study options. Please bear in mind that the College of Education, Dr. Windschitl, and Dr. Thompson have pushed to accept all possible credits from IslandWood to count in our MEd. Program. However,

there will courses from I-Wood that cannot count towards the degree. So, it is possible, then, to have accumulated 45 credits or more on your transcript, but not have the appropriate required courses in particular “blocks” to graduate (in Foundations, for example you must have 9 credits).

The sample course-of-study forms that we provide you show only the courses that we will accept. If you have an advisor other than Dr. Thompson or Dr. Windschitl, you need to check with them to see which courses they will accept in various categories. Please note also that the advisor has the final say on accepting or waiving certain classes as fulfilling requirements or requiring additional courses.

You can finish in one of three ways (these are referred to as the Culminating Options). One is to write a thesis (counts as 9 credits toward the total requirement of 45). A second option is to do a project that is negotiated between you and an advisor (also 9 credits). The third option is to take all 45 credits in coursework, plus take a final exam. Regardless of the way you finish, you will attend one colloquium as an observer and present your work at a second colloquium, hosted in the TLC area each quarter (more on that later), as part of the graduation requirements. The details of these are spelled out in the official TLC documents available on-line. If you are an advisee of Dr. Thompson or Dr. Windschitl, and you select a project as a final culminating option, please note that the project may involve developing some form of instructional innovation (unit of instruction, technology, or other kind of learning situation), testing it out with a group of learners and collecting data on how the learners responded to/learned from your instruction, is a requirement.

Please note that it is not possible to graduate before the end of winter quarter. This is due to the fact that some required courses are offered in the winter and that there is a minimum requirement by our graduate school for attending courses on campus.

Any questions you have about financial aid or teaching assistantships should be directed to our Student Services Office.

Please let us know if we can help you answer any other questions—

Dr. Mark Windschitl Dr. Jessica Thompsonmwind@uw.edu jjthomps@uw.edu

M.Ed. Guide for Science Education 2018-2020

• Minimum 45 credits of coursework at or above the 400 level • Minimum 18 graded credits• Minimum 18 credits of the 45 are above 500 level.

• Note: Other courses taken at Islandwood, even though they appear on your transcript, do not satisfy any of the required course groups below.

If you are planning to get a non-profit or a restoration ecology certificate, concurrent with your masters, be aware that only 6 credits may overlap between the degree requirements (45 credits) and the certificate requirements (~18-20 credits) and that you must take the coursework needed to meet both requirements if you plan to be awarded both the degree and certificate.

Foundations of Education Minimum 9 credits

Courses credit grade 500EDC&I 503 Foundations of Curriculum and Instruction (required at UW, winter) 4EDC&I 494 D Child Growth and Development (I-Wood) 3EDLPS 479 A Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education (I-Wood) 3

Science Education Study Option Minimum 15 credits in the natural sciences

Courses credit grade 500EDC&I 473 A Natural History and Ecology (I-Wood) 3EDC&I 495 B Strategies for Effective School Partnerships (I-Wood) 3

Curriculum and Instruction Minimum 6 credits

Courses credit grade 500EDC&I 571 Seminar in Science Education (required, UW, Winter) 4EDC&I 473 A Science Methods: An Inquiry Approach (I-Wood) 4EDC&I 494 A Curriculum & Instruction Methods (I-Wood) 3EDC&I 509 Advanced Instructional Strategies (I-Wood) 3EDC&I 510 Non-Profit Administration & Leadership (I-Wood) 4EDC&I 506 Intro to Qualitative Methods (I-Wood) 3EDC&I 508 Integrating Gardens in Teaching & Learning (I-Wood) 2

Culminating Option (coursework + exam, or project, or thesis)Project or thesis worth 9 credits at 500+ level. If you take 9 credits of coursework, they don’t have to be at the 500 level, just bear in mind you have to have a total of 18 at the 500 level across all your 45 credits of coursework.

Courses beyond those above to get to a total of 45 credit grade 500

TOTALSrequired 45 18 18

Note! This is not an official document, read the Core Requirements document on the TLC Website

1) I-Wood students must spend at least 2 academic quarters taking courses at the UW (fall, winter, spring)2) You must file for a leave of absence if you do not take courses for any academic quarter during the program.3) Sign up for the Education list-serve, pay attention to e-mails.

To Help You Navigate the System

Earlier things to attend to, typically in Fall Quarter:

• Check in with your advisor sometime in October (or earlier) to re-introduce yourself and make sure you are doing the right things to graduate. Advisors are happy to meet from that point on, as you request.

• If you want to do a project to culminate your degree, consult with your advisor. IslandWood students have been creative and diverse in their project selection, ranging from creating curriculum for some group of learners and then testing out a piece of that curriculum, to studying whale watching naturalists interact with people on cruises, to using gardening workshops to support traumatized women, to helping IslandWood staff figure out how to accommodate special needs kids for the overnight program. If you create curriculum for any learner, you must test at least parts of it out. That’s where the real learning happens.

• Attendance is required at two Master’s colloquia, either in Fall or Winter to observe, then you present at a colloquium in the quarter you graduate. These are usually held in the evening near the end of the quarter. Occasionally, the Fall quarter colloquium has to be cancelled because fewer people tend to graduate at that point. If, and only if that is the case, you will not be held accountable for attending a colloquium as an observer before you present at the colloquium the following quarter.

Later in Fall and in Winter Quarter:

• If you intend to culminate your degree by taking all 45 credits in coursework, and finish by writing exam responses, talk to your advisor first, then follow these directions.

- You need to ask two instructors with whom you’ve had coursework to write you a question each. These can be instructors from IslandWood, but please do NOT ask two people from IslandWood to write questions and evaluate responses—they get asked a lot.

- E-mail your instructors of choice by reminding them who you are, and saying how much you enjoyed their class. Tell them that you are contacting them because you are a graduating MEd student and one requirement is that you have to write an exam response to a “big question” where you apply ideas from the course you’ve taken or you synthesize ideas from the course to make a point or critique an idea. There are even more possibilities, but those are two.

- Tell the instructor that they are NOT responsible for providing extensive feedback, but only to designate that your response “Passes” or “Needs more work.” Your advisors (Jessica or Mark) do not need to be involved in the negotiation of the questions, but can help you initially draft a couple versions if you’d like help.

- The responses to each question have to be a minimum of 10 double spaced pages. You need to communicate this to your exam evaluator.

- You can write your exam either as a take-home or in a proctored setting. Usually at the start of each quarter, you’ll get an e-mail blast from the Office of Student Services suggesting that the exam needs to be proctored and written on a particular day. However, that is NOT required, your responses CAN be take-homes.

- Because winter or spring can be busy times for you, we recommend that you ask one instructor to write you a question so you can respond to it over winter break, and leave the other for winter or spring.

- Your advisor (Jessica or Mark) needs to hear from the instructor that you’ve passed, at the latest by the last day of classes—not the last day of finals week—of the quarter in which you intend to graduate.

• Early each quarter, our Office of Student Services sends out directions for students who intend to graduate that quarter. Read and follow those directions. One requirement is to fill out a generic course of study form for MEd students. Because IslandWood has slightly different requirements, you’ll need to delete some of the courses that are already typed into the form and insert all the courses you’ve taken. The headings will not match the “cheat sheet” in this handout, but they will be close enough for you to determine where different courses should be inserted.

• When you present at a colloquium, create a poster, usually a trifold, that displays key ideas and products from either your MEd project or, if you’ve finished by taking extra coursework and doing the exam questions, then present on any class project you have done during your degree which you would like to share with the public (this can be from IslandWood if you like). It is always good to have a well-constructed poster to display key ideas and perhaps products of

your work. The colloquium is not a “stand-up presentation” but a gallery format in which people circulate among the posters and engage in conversations with you.

Frequently Asked Questions

• Can I get credit for previous work done in projects or writing? No, sorry.

• Can I take a project I’ve already started and extend that into a MEd project? Yes, but please meet early with your advisor because you must extend what you have already done, meaning a significant addition to an existing project and this has to be designed in consultation with the advisor. You can’t come in after the fact to your advisor and ask if your extension is OK.

• Are required courses actually required? Yes.

Who should I contact for help or answers to questions?