One of EiE’s crowning achievements is our Professional Development (PD) program. Elementary educators who come into our workshops knowing almost nothing about engineering leave feeling like EiE experts. But as much as our PD staff would love to show every single teacher the best practices to implement EiE, they can’t be everywhere at once. So when a district or school needs to prepare many teachers to implement EiE and provide the long-term support they know their teachers need, they send their professional development providers to one of our Teacher Educator Institutes.

This November, the EiE professional development team is offering two free webinars designed to improve your teaching practice: on November 8, "Effective Questioning Strategies for Your STEM Classroom" and on November 15, "Meaningful Integration of STEM in Elementary Classrooms." In these sessions, you'll learn from the experts as you study classroom footage, align lessons to national standards, test out new questioning strategies, and more! Read on to learn more about these interactive, one-hour sessions and register today!

The EiE team is committed to making engineering accessible to all students, including the fastest-growing student population in the U.S. in the last decade—English Learners. It’s why we offer Spanish translations of storybooks, family letters, and student handouts for every unit (find them in the Resource tab of each unit page). We know that even when you have the resources, it can feel intimidating to begin an engineering curriculum in a classroom with English Learners. But teachers have told us that the risk is worth the reward—even though EiE requires a lot of thought and preparation, they’ve seen how EiE excites and engages their English Learner populations. Karissa Weiler; a third-grade teacher at Keeling Elementary in Tuscon, Arizona; loves using EiE with her kids. After we visited her school to shoot some classroom videos, we knew we had to share some of her strategies—when you see her class in action, we think you’ll agree! Check out Karissa’s five tips below and scroll to the bottom to watch a video of her young engineers!

Effective materials management is key to the success of a hands-on, inquiry-based program like EiE. In each teacher guide, our curriculum team included tips to help educators prepare student workstations and organize their classrooms. We developed many of these tips based on the teacher feedback we received during the development process. But we’re always listening to and responding to educators’ feedback, even after the development process is done. In our quest to make teachers’ days easier, we developed additional resources to guide them as they teach EiE. Check out these three resources to make materials management a breeze this school year!

In our out-of-school-time curricula, Engineering Adventures and Engineering Everywhere, we strive to emphasize real-world connections that make engineering feel relevant to youth. You can always find articles, videos, and books on each unit’s resource page (find EA resources here and EE resources here!), but our staff is constantly finding new viral videos and articles that relate to our units. Here are four timely connections that will show your kids that engineering is all around them, and is constantly changing the world.