Today’s students are tomorrow’s teachers. At least, that’s the hope of Educators Rising, a group that offers highschoolers a chance to explore a career in education.
A record number of students attended the annual Learning Expo on Wednesday.
High school students from 23 South Dakota school districts gathered at Dakota State University in Madison for the annual Educators Rising Learning Expo. Events like Wednesday's are a step towards shrinking national and local teacher shortages.
In one session at the expo students learned different skills through an escape room by
attempting to crack the code of five separate locks attached to a safe.
The session is led by Betsy Schamber, an assistant professor at DSU and former middle-school science teacher. She said utilizing the escape room was a “sneaky way” to engage students, but more importantly a tool to teach them what being an educator is like.
“We are always problem solving. We always have to think creatively about not only our content and our lesson strategies, but different students have different abilities and how do we reach those students and help move the needle for all of the kids. We also talk a little bit about we want the students to be actively engaged," Schamber said. "Sitting and listening to a teacher is maybe not the best method for learning. Students that are actively engaged; their minds are going. It also brought out the option to have conversations with other students and collaborate, and I think that’s really important in terms of social skills and soft skills.”
She said when the students are on campus it gives DSU and Educators Rising the
opportunity to share some of the positives of teaching, because students often hear the negatives.
“Mainly just showing them that I really love what I do. Sometimes we can all, at any job, see what the hard parts are, and every job has hard parts, and in this job there’s also equally great parts," Schamber said. "So, we really try to focus on building their content, building their methods, how do we teach, how do we get the students engaged in a way that they want to learn that they like to be there and then we focus then on strategies specific to the age group and specific to the content area.”
This year’s expo had a record 177 high school students and 24 educators registered.
