Original Goals Statement

Erin E. Peters

April, 2004

My career interest began in engineering, but after working for one year as an electrical engineer, I knew that I needed more interaction with people.  Teaching science combined my two interests:  scientific thinking, and personal interaction with people.  Teaching physics, chemistry, earth science, physical science, algebra and geometry in Illinois, for the Saudi Arabian Embassy, and in northern Virginia has given me the opportunity to collaborate with teachers from diverse backgrounds.  I seized every opportunity to learn from all of the teachers I have worked with and as a result have a strong pedagogy and a broad base of teaching strategies.  Being an ambitious, hard-working, and creative teacher for 13 years has helped me to become a leader in my field.  I am the Lead Science Teacher at Williamsburg Middle School in Arlington, Virginia where I have instituted professional development during our monthly curriculum based meetings.  The principal at Williamsburg, Kathleen Francis, understood how important it is to collaborate and requires all departments to have professional development discussions at their meetings.   For five years, I have also authored curriculum for use in all physical science classrooms in Arlington Public Schools, including several units with Problem-Based Learning scenarios.  I have been a member of the Virginia Standards of Learning Grade 8 Science Content Review Committee for two years, where my responsibilities include editing field test questions and evaluating the statistics of previously field-tested questions for scientific and educational merit.  I keep current in the field by speaking regularly at Virginia Association of Science Teacher conferences and National Science Teacher Association conferences about inquiry learning.  I am continuing to work to become a better educator by being a candidate for the National Boards for Professional Teaching Standards in the certification of Early Adolescent Science.  Through these avenues I take every opportunity to become a better teacher.

            I plan to be a middle school science teacher for approximately ten more years.  I am very motivated to stay in the classroom by the new technology available such as the Vernier Logger-Pro probeware that allows students to gather data previously impossible to measure.  For example, students can use the probeware to plot a distance versus time graph and a velocity versus time graph simultaneously for a moving object.   Students can throw a ball in the air and watch its trajectory on the distance time graph while seeing that the velocity at the top of the throw is zero.  Teachers have taught this concept through logic, but it is much more powerful when students can physically do the action themselves.  I believe technology will only improve and curriculum changes will closely follow, and I would like to help facilitate those changes for Arlington Public Schools. 

I would also like to stay in the classroom to conduct action research with my students.  Some of the topics I would like to explore include the effectiveness of selecting high, middle and low heterogeneous groups versus randomly selecting groups for cooperative learning.  I would also like to research the achievement of girls and boys in single gender groups versus the achievement of girls and boys in mixed gender groups.  Having previously taught a single gender science elective course for girls, I am intrigued by the difference in the students’ behavior in the single gender class and the co-ed class. 

If I am accepted into the Doctoral Program with a Specialization in Science Education Leadership and graduate, I would like to pursue a career as a science methods professor and teach pre-service teachers.   I plan to focus my post-graduate research on comparisons of methodologies for effective science teaching.  As a classroom teacher, I often see administrations change focus on methods each year just for the sake of change.  The administrators often do not base their decisions on scientific evidence.  I would like to contribute to the pool of knowledge so that educators can make informed decisions about effective classroom methods.  I am also interested in pursuing research in the cultures of successful teachers.  The topic of successful teachers seems to be ill-defined and elusive.  I would like to focus my efforts into researching groups of teachers and individual teachers who have experienced consistent academic success in their communities, and define these characteristics so that they may be adopted by appropriate educators. 

I feel I have the qualities that are well suited for this type of research.  I enjoy observing situations, identifying problems and acting for a solution.  For example, when the Standards of Learning Tests were first administered, I saw that they addressed only a level of knowledge based in recall or comprehension.  I took the steps to learn how teachers can get involved in editing the tests, and applied for the committee.  As a member of the committee for the past two years, I have demanded that the questions on the Standards of Learning Test address enduring understandings and have worked to eliminate narrowly focused recall questions. 

The Doctoral Program with a specialization in Science Education Leadership will help me build my skills so that I can pursue the teaching and research career I desire.  Science education is extremely important to our communities in the age of communication.  Teaching our youth to be critical, scientific thinkers will help them make informed decisions in all aspects of their lives.  In ten years, I want to be in a position to ask important questions about the direction science education is taking, do research to answer these questions, and communicate the results to the science education community.