SMATE NEWSLETTER - Fall 2026

SMATE Quarterly Newsletter — Fall 2026

Fall Welcome

As an educator, I’ll be the first to admit that summer break never feels long enough. But there’s something to be said for the structure of routines and the buzz of energy that comes with the start of a new school year. Despite my love of sunshine and being outdoors, the desire to reconnect with fellow educators and support students makes coming back to school always worth it!

This newsletter edition includes a look at what SMATE was up to this summer, along with helpful classroom resources and events to help connect us throughout the fall.

So, welcome back! We hope you’ll join us for some of the fun.

What’s Inside:

Message from SMATE’s Director: Emily Borda
Summer fun with Compas2Campus Partnership
Register: WSTA Conference in Bellingham
SEEK: Learning Together, Sharing Resources
What If Science Led the Way in Literacy Instruction?

Welcome back to the school year! I hope you have had a relaxing and revitalizing summer, and are ready to start thinking about STEM in your classroom! Although we at SMATE have been taking a break as well, we’ve also had some interesting projects and plans taking shape over the summer. I hope you can find some relevant and helpful resources in this newsletter, as well as some interesting stories. I continue to be so proud of the work our faculty and staff do to support K-12 STEM education and am also grateful for our K-12 partners from whom we continue to learn about STEM education in our local schools!

-Emily

Expanding Access to STEM Through Campus Visits

This summer, SMATE welcomed more than 100 students through four different campus visits organized in partnership with Compas2Campus. These visits brought students from communities across the region to the SMATE Learning Resource Center, providing opportunities to explore hands-on STEM resources and experience a university learning environment.

3 students working at SMATE with skeletons

In early July, we welcomed 20 sixth-grade students from the Lummi Nation. Later that month, 15 Children of the Valley students and 40 middle school migrant summer school students from Skagit Valley visited SMATE. In August, we welcomed 40 seventh-grade students from Rainier Scholars in Tacoma as part of their residential college retreat at Western.

Many of these students face barriers to accessing STEM resources and hands-on learning experiences, including limited resources and geographic isolation. At SMATE, students have the opportunity to do more than tour a university. They can touch, observe, experiment, and engage with science in a welcoming, hands-on environment.
Students shared that visiting SMATE was the highlight of their trip and expressed how much these experiences meant to them:

“I loved the SMATE building and getting to hold stick bugs.”

Whitney Morrison and 3 students gathered around a table, studying a stick bug

“It was fun looking into a microscope because I have never actually seen into one, so that was pretty fun for me! I really loved the field trip overall and I learned so much.”

4 students playing with engineering design earthquake simulator

These experiences help make college and STEM education feel more tangible. A visit to SMATE can turn the idea of college from something abstract into a place where students can imagine themselves learning, exploring, and participating. We are grateful to our Compas2Campus partners for bringing these groups to SMATE and look forward to continuing to welcome students from across our region.

Come Join Us for WSTA in Bellingham!

This fall, the Washington Science Teachers Association (WSTA) is bringing its annual conference to Bellingham! The 2026 Washington State Conference on Science Education will take place October 23–24 at Sehome High School, with pre-conference activities and field experiences beginning Friday afternoon. Saturday will feature a keynote, sessions, exhibitors, lunch, and plenty of opportunities to connect with other science educators.

The conference is a wonderful opportunity to learn from science educators across Washington, share classroom ideas, explore new resources, and reconnect with colleagues. This year's keynote speaker is Dr. Mary Brunkow, a 2025 Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine, and the conference will also include outdoor learning experiences, social gatherings, STEM clock hours, vendors, and opportunities to celebrate Washington science educators.

We hope you'll come spend some time with us in Bellingham. Whether you are a classroom teacher, preservice teacher, administrator, or science education partner, we'd love to see you there.

Learn more about the 2026 WSTA Conference and register

SEEK Science Leads: Learning Together, Sharing Resources

One of the goals of SMATE's SEEK (Science Education for Equity in K–6) project is to build a sustainable model of teacher leadership in which educators can share their expertise across schools and districts while responding to the needs of their local communities.

This summer, SEEK Science Leads came together with SMATE faculty and staff for a workshop focused on scientific modeling and explanations. Workshop facilitators curated resources for elementary classrooms focused on the following topics:

Eliciting Student Ideas

Resource	What You’ll Find
Eliciting Students’ Ideas and Adapting Instruction Primer	This primer describes one of Ambitious Science Teaching’s core practices: eliciting student ideas. It includes guidance for planning how to elicit students’ ideas, enacting the practice in the classroom, and adapting further instruction based on what students reveal.
Rapid Survey of Student Thinking	This Ambitious Science Teaching tool helps teachers make sense of and trace student ideas throughout a unit. Students bring many ideas, experiences, and modes of expression to the classroom; this tool helps identify those resources and use them to inform instruction.

Scientific Modeling:

Resource	What You’ll Find
Models and Modeling: An Introduction	This Ambitious Science Teaching paper describes the importance of modeling and explanation for building scientific knowledge and provides examples of modeling in elementary and secondary science classrooms. It also describes five qualities of models that make them useful in K–12 science classrooms.
Scientific Models and Modeling Reading Page P.26	This practice brief describes different types of models, the practice of modeling, and the distinctions between student and teacher models. More CKT resources on its website.
Making Changes in Student Thinking Visible Over Time	This Ambitious Science Teaching paper describes a toolkit of face-to-face tools for use in K–12 classrooms. The tools make students’ ideas visible and are constructed by students and revised over time as they learn from science experiences.
Supporting Students in Revising Ideas with Models	This collection of Ambitious Science Teaching resources supports students in revising ideas with models. Resources include presentations, teaching strategies, classroom examples, videos, and explanations, along with sections focused on equity, classroom stories, teacher educators and professional learning, and related research.

Interdisciplinary Connections:

Resource	What You’ll Find
STEM Teaching Tool Practice Brief 1	Philip Bell and Andrew Shouse explore the distinction between explanation and argumentation practices in the classroom and why that distinction matters for STEM learning.
Constructing Scientific Explanations Slides	Tracy Coskie’s slides from the SEEK Summer 2026 Workshop, providing an introduction to constructing scientific explanations.
What–How–Why Rubric Teacher Guide	Located toward the bottom of the Ambitious Science Teaching page, this teacher guide explains how to use the What–How–Why rubric to support students in developing scientific explanations.

Assessment:

Resource	What You’ll Find
Science Assessment Grounded in Equity (SAGE): Vision and Goals	The SAGE project is a collaboration between the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction and the University of Colorado Boulder, involving Washington educators, OSPI science experts, and CU Boulder faculty. The Vision and Goals explore the question: What if assessment was a caring practice?
Science Assessment Grounded in Equity (SAGE) Framework	The SAGE Framework helps educators identify features of high-quality assessment tasks, examine effective assessment practices, and consider how assessments can support the diversity of learners engaged in science learning.
Check and Connect Assessment Guidance	Check and Connect Assessments are short, lesson-level formative assessments designed to elicit students’ experiences and three-dimensional understandings. The SAGE project provides guidance for designing these assessments along with a Check and Connect Item Library featuring examples from educators.

Please feel free to use any of these tools and reach out to Shannon Warren with any questions about sources or implementation.

We are excited to continue this work throughout the coming year, and especially excited that several SEEK Science Leads will be sharing their work at the upcoming WSTA Conference alongside Dr. Emily Borda of SMATE, Dr. Tracy Coskie of Woodring College of Education, and Shannon Warren, Director of STEM Faculty Development and K–12 Partnerships.

What If Science Led the Way in Literacy Instruction?

SMATE is pleased to highlight a recent publication by Dr. Stephanie Strachan and Dr. Tracy Coskie of Woodring College of Education, and of Dr. Emily Borda of SMATE. Published by the International Literacy Association, “What If Science Led the Way in Literacy Instruction?” explores how science can serve as the foundation for rich, interdisciplinary literacy learning.

The authors challenge the common approach of using science topics primarily as a vehicle for reading instruction. Instead, they ask what might happen if science led the way, with students building scientific knowledge through phenomena, investigation, discussion, reading, writing, and argument from evidence. As they explain, “If content integration can be viewed as a dance, we argue there is greatest potential for rich knowledge building if we allow science to serve as the lead.”

For elementary educators, this perspective offers an exciting way to think about integrating science and literacy without sacrificing meaningful science learning. When students investigate authentic questions, they have purposeful reasons to read, write, communicate ideas, analyze evidence, and develop disciplinary language. The result is an approach that strengthens both scientific understanding and literacy while giving students meaningful opportunities to make sense of the world around them.

Read “What If Science Led the Way in Literacy Instruction?”

Looking Ahead

Fall is always a busy season at SMATE, but it is also one of our favorite times of year. Our classrooms are full again, our Learning Resource Center is welcoming K–12 visitors, and our partnerships across the region are growing.

We are grateful for the educators who continue to share their knowledge, try new approaches, invite us into their classrooms, and help us think differently about how we prepare and support science teachers.

We hope to see many of you at WSTA in October, and throughout the year as we continue learning together.

Warmly,

Whitney Morrison
Facilities, Collections and Technology Manager | Senior Instructor
SMATE | Western Washington University | College of Science & Engineering