Tracy Watson spent the past seven years teaching mathematics to high school students, most recently at Benton High School. Now she is ready to share her knowledge and experience not only with high school students across the state but educators as well.
Watson is the newest educator to join the STEM Pathways faculty at the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts. Her primary focus will be to prepare high school educators across the state to offer AP Statistics at their school.
She started at ASMSA on July 1. She is spending this academic year working with educators to find out what they need in order to offer AP Statistics to their students and helping them broaden their current curriculum. From that, she will develop learning modules covering the AP Statistics course content.
“I will officially begin offering the curriculum next year with a kickoff boot camp during Summer of 2022,” Watson said. “I have a few teachers I’ve connected with this year and have helped them get started with things like pacing guides and homework assignment selection. I hope to continue to do the little things to help them this year.”
ASMSA’s STEM Pathways program began in 2015 with the creation of the Coding Arkansas’ Future initiative. That program offered high schools across the state the opportunity to expand its computer science curriculum while receiving guidance and professional development from ASMSA staff members. While ASMSA instructors taught some computer science courses for schools through digital learning, the main emphasis was preparing educators to become computer science teachers.
That included offering summer boot camps to introduce teachers to computer science. Those teachers received guidance throughout the school year from ASMSA, including continuing professional development through weekly video meetings and a follow-up camp at the conclusion of the academic year. The goal not only to prepare those educators to earn their license to teach computer science while also being the primary computer science teacher at their school.
The program expanded in recent years to offer a middle school coding block and the Advanced Biology program. In the Advanced Biology program, instructors around the state receive professional development from ASMSA’s life science instructors in the instruction of AP Biology. ASMSA’s biology teachers guide camps prior to the beginning of the school year. They then help educators prepare their curriculum for the year and provide unique lab learning activities that the individual schools may not be able to offer otherwise.
The success of those programs led ASMSA to consider adding AP Statistics to the STEM Pathways program. Watson said now is an appropriate time to add the course to the program’s offerings as statistics becomes more integrated into various courses.
“For the past seven years, I have thoroughly enjoyed teaching AP Statistics to high school students,” Watson said. “During that time, it became clear how important it is for everyone to have a basic understanding of statistics. When I heard that the STEM Pathways program was expanding to Statistics, I knew this would be a way I could share my passion for the class and its importance and to help students and teachers alike see its value.”
In addition to her past several years in a high school classroom, Watson has also taught on the college level, including 13 years at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She also spent three years as a teacher in ASMSA’s former Office of Distance Education. She was part of a start-up team for the program in 1998 and taught calculus for three years.
Her AP Statistics class will rely on some video distance education as well, but the methods and the reliability of such education has greatly improved since those early days in ODE, she said.
During her time with ODE, educators connected visually with classes through the Internet, but they still had to rely on the phone for audio.
“I remember getting on a conference phone call with several school and then keeping my fingers crossed trying to connect my computer with theirs,” she said. “When we did get a connection, there was always a delay that we had to manage, but we made it work. It was really neat because the students were able to interact with students in a different part of the state. We had to send out weekly mailings of handouts to ensure schools had the materials for the following week.
“Now, even though we are still impatient when there is a lag, we can see students in a video and share our computer screen and hear their voices almost immediately! No more mailing handouts or waiting to receive papers to grade. It’s all done on the computer. Students can still do their math by hand, but then they just snap a picture and send it or they can even use a table to write their work electronically.”
Watson said her experience will be valuable in constructing the course so that both students and educators get the most benefit from it. She said she understands the expectation of quality learning outcomes from a course from her college experience while appreciating the challenges high school teachers face every day to balance classroom time, duty time, prep time, grading time and meeting time.
“Efficiency has to be the primary goal to get it all done,” she said.
Included in that is not wasting time in training workshops that don’t result in a beneficial learning experience.
“I understand that teachers want to walk away with knowledge that applies to their classroom,” Watson said.