Brainstorming Report outs

Saturday May 17, 9:15 am


Beyond Classroom Teaching


Developing ideas for new kinds of extracurricular or co-curricular experiences
Jackie Huntoon, Karen Grove, Joan Prival, Tom Lindsay, Cathy Summa

What other types of experiences would be useful for future teachers? What types of programs or experiences might bridge education and research in ways particularly useful for future teachers? What types of summer experiences would be useful? What types of internship programs would be particularly appropriate?

Types of experiences

Hit the ground running -- how do we help them do this -- and develop a set of tools to help them do this?

  • mentoring science fair projects for K-12 students (and/or judging science fairs)
  • get students into classrooms right at the beginning, even before declared teaching
  • get involved in after-school (weekend) activities working with kids
  • use museums and informal science areas -- cf NY Hall of Science: puts pre-service people into Museum of Natural History as "explainers" (rather than docents)
  • preservice teachers do research project -- design into lesson plan/curriculum/unit plan related to research experience; include relevant standards and benchmarks in unit; include how standards can be addressed in multiple ways (or multiples standards, especially integrating standards in math, other sciences, nature and process of science standards) -- worry less about name of course, and more about content and skills you want to develop
  • work with campus child-care center
  • work with after-school/latch-key kids programs
  • hands-on activities to aid visualization of complex 3-D relationships
  • model different teaching techniques (jigsaw, etc) in classroom setting -- gives students simple experiments to use in future classroom, and also models pedagogy (i.e. teaching density, structural relations)
  • get students used to using DLESE resources (needs more peer review before materials posted; needs to be really clearly tied to standards)
  • use large, publically available data sets (NOAA, USGS, etc. -- weather, streamflow, etc.) in classroom activities to get preservice teachers familiar with datasets and how to use these in classroom setting
    • participation in NAGT/NSTA/AGU/GSA etc, workshops (department could sponsor a student poster session)

Programs to bridge education & research

  • develop lesson plans with research/capstone projects; incorporate standards and benchmarks into lesson/uni development
  • use technology to help visualization of topics (climate, meteorology, SEM analyses)
  • link the universities to K-12 schools via online offerings, remote instrumentation, etc.

Summer experiences

  • College for Kids programs
  • outdoor school (Oregon) -- middle school kids spend a week outdoors -- counselors were HS or college students; students who don't do well in traditional schools excel in this model

Internship programs

  • NSF funded diversity program at SFSU -- 9th grade integrated science courses -- with preservice interns during the program; during academic year, the intern is out in the schools with the teacher; interns get actual classroom experience helping to implement activities associated with watershed theme; intern also gets experience helping to develop and implement lesson plans -- not necessarily students who are declared teaching majors -- K-12 program designed to attract undergraduates into teaching -- put STEM undergraduates into classrooms and give them experiences -- often grabs students into teaching.