Iowa workplaces opening doors to local teachers:
Lacey Wolter engaging with Dubuque County Conservation
This summer, the Iowa Governor’s STEM Advisory Council matched teachers from schools across Iowa with local STEM workplaces for the ninth year of the Iowa STEM Teacher Externships program.
Our very own Lacey Wolter, a science teacher at Cascade Junior/Senior High School, is spending six weeks expanding her STEM careers and job skills knowledge at Dubuque County Conservation. She is building new ways to connect the Teacher Externship experience directly to classroom content and 21st Century Skills identified in the Iowa Core Curriculum. Plus, Dubuque County Conservation enjoys the help of an educated and skilled local teacher as a participant and contributor on projects for the summer.
Lacey is mostly working on geo-tagging monuments, memorials and significant items in Dubuque’s seventeen county parks, while also creating an orienteering course at White Water Canyon for students and adults to use for recreation.
Over 60 teachers across the state were matched with workplaces near their school districts based on that organization’s needs, the teacher’s skills and the subject they teach. By keeping the matches local, these school-business partnerships create lasting partnerships between the teacher, the teacher’s local school and that business/industry, ultimately providing students with STEM career information about business and industry in their community, as well as an answer to the question, “When am I ever going to use this?”
“The students are the main beneficiaries of the program,” said Meghan Reynolds, program coordinator. “Teachers bring relevance to their classrooms through lessons built off their Teacher Externship experience, as well as the ability to expose students to STEM careers that they may not have known existed.”
The work that Lacey is doing will not only be an asset to her classroom, but to our whole district as we enhance the knowledge of and opportunities for work-based learning in the Western Dubuque Community School District.