Abstract
This project is a collaborative effort involving seven partners. The partnership comprises Waldo County Technical Center and Tri-County Technical Center (CTE Centers), Mt. View High School and Nokomis Regional High School (High Schools that are High Need LEAs), Unity College (Institution of Higher Education – IHE), the University of Maine (support for one of the scientists engaged in the project), and Acadia Partners for Science and Learning, which is a non-profit organization that manages education and research activity at the Schoodic Education and Research Center in Acadia National Park.
This project will bring together teachers, working scientists, and college
education faculty to:
Enhance use of problem-centered learning in math and science.
Support teachers as they develop approaches to learning results related to understanding of systems, use of models, change, and scale.
Support teachers in achieving learning results related to the skills and traits of scientific inquiry and technological design, incorporating the processes of working scientists in student research.
Connect working research scientists with classroom teachers.
Develop a set of shared research problems in areas related to ongoing professional research that students in different schools can work on, sharing hypotheses and results.
Create a student research publishing environment that can be used in performance assessment.
Initiate broad outreach of knowledge gained in this project to other teachers in Maine, with a focus on teachers who are not yet Highly Qualified.
Use these initial efforts to create sustainable interaction between teachers, working scientists, and college education faculty.
We will initiate this program with a planning session between teachers, scientists, and education faculty to identify research problems that teachers will pursue in the 2007-08 year. During the year a core group of teachers will work with the scientists to develop new skills in problem-based science and math instruction. At the end of the year we will organize a workshop to share techniques and lessons learned with other teachers. We will build a web-based professional learning community to help sustain and expand this work.
