Improvements through the Second Year Research Experiences for Teachers Program.

We have successfully finished our second summer in our National Science Foundation (NSF) supported Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) Site entitled "Multidisciplinary Engineering Research for Rural Michigan's Future." The summer program was 6 weeks long and hosted 7 in-service teachers (high school science) and 5 pre-service teachers (integrated science majors). Participants were split into 6 groups and teamed up with an engineering faculty and an engineering undergraduate student each. During their 40 hours/week work schedule, participants worked on faculty supervised research projects for half their time, and the rest was reserved for classroom unit plans that participants would work on developing. Different from the first year, participants were assigned management roles during the summer. Also, each participant prepared new lesson plans and classroom activities that align with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). The academic year class activities from first year were debriefed and learned lessons were generated. In this paper, we will give the details about the RET Site's management and discuss our experiences from our second year with the improvements and their effects. We hope that our shared experiences (struggles, accomplishments, mistakes, etc.) will help the engineering education community develop more effective relationships with K-12 by using the models we implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]