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Fortunately, our project still has most of the original teacher leaders. The first year we did a three day training session on mentor/coaching leadership, science content knowledge workshops in earth and physical science (hands-on experiences and in the field work for earth science, a graduate class in action research, training in kit presentation skills in which how many of our project's major goals were to be addressed by embedding them in the presentation: meeting the standards, adding more inquiry, connecting to other subject areas, and working with a scientist for the content knowledge. Over the last two years, we have trained a number of these people at the Exploratorium and have then used their expertise with other teacher leaders and other project teachers. We soon will have three inqiry based centers located throughout our project. One of our latest and still not completely organized efforts is an inquiry discussion group that will be extented into our state bulletin board network so our long distance participants can take part in the discussion. We have also connected a number of interested teacher leaders to projects from our university and local museum: YPOP a group working on curriculum based on the sun, an internet class on developing curriculum for the solar system that then will be directed to the classrooms via telecommunications, a writer for NASA curriculum, several teachers across the project were helped to do a unit and share results from class to class via the MetNet bulletin board (good practice for helping other teachers become comfortable with this communication method. This year our focus with teacher leaders is how to adapt existing curriculum to fit best practice as defined in the standards and research literature. With this, we will also be adapting their science and technology plans so that the possibility for sustainablility of staff development and program is more of a reality. We have been working the leader in the individual districts and schools to provide this same training at the local level in an effort to make it apply directly to their need structure. Each year, we have used these leaders to present sectionals on kits at our summer institutes. We have supported these people to present at local, state, and national conferences.
Myra Louise Miller,
1/15/1999
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