Mystic Seaport Teachers of the Year Summer Institute

Museums utilize their collections to tell a story about the past.

How can you have students develop inquiry using museum collections?

How would one even start? 

 For an example, the Smithsonian explains the collaboration behind developing an exhibit, and the evidence they will curate from the collection to support a claim. 

 Think about how you may be able to do something similar with your own students while at the Seaport.

 

For our purposes, digital copies of handouts and an inquiry template is curated into a shared Google drive.  NEW LINK TO GOOGLE DRIVE. Please feel free to download anything you need here, but please do not remove items from the drive.  A folder-within-a-folder has been set up to store your work and to collaborate with your peers. For the purpose of the Mystic Seaport for Educators site, we would ideally want as many inquiries as possible to be published.

Inquiry & Connections to the CT Core Standards

The link to the CT Social Studies Framework has more specific information by grade level, but here is the overarching connection to the CCSS and C3.

The Next Generation Science Standards are inherently inquiry-based, but if you are not sure how to start and connect to the Seaport, choose parameters in the drop-down menus first, and see what pops up. The choices are then narrowed down, which should make it easier to connect. 
In CT Core Standards, the Speaking & Listening strand easily fits in with student-centered and collaborative learning.

Our Goals

Teachers are looking for student-centered inquiry lessons to engage students with local and global resources. The Mystic Seaport wants to meet teachers' needs by providing high-quality examples of inquiries tied to their collection. While at the Seaport, there will be many opportunities to explore the collection and think about bringing it into your classroom. We have incorporated time to collaborate and contemplate how to develop an inquiry. The completed inquiries will be published on educators.mysticseaport.org.

For those of you interested in finding out how a whale was harvested, you may wish to see the following video: