The whole idea is that we’ve been working for about fifteen years on our teacher education
programs, teacher professional development.
About fifteen years ago we started with very intensive model of five-day summer institute
followed by follow-up in the classroom with our educators throughout the course of the
year.
So, leaving behind the sort of half day teacher workshop model and going to something really
much sort of deeper and, as I said, intensive where we spend five days-- five solid days
with teachers in the summer.
We were introducing a pedagogy that was called event-based science, which is really just
a-- kind of an iteration of problem-based-- or project-based learning, where you begin
a curriculum unit with a real news story-- actual news footage to hook the students into
this particular topic where they know this isn’t just some lab out of someone’s imagination,
that this is a real thing that happened, and then the rest of the unit sort of builds off
of that hook where a set of activities are developed.
And students are challenged to complete a task that resembles real life work.
One of the most successful ones was a group who was-- decided to design a unit around
a sixth grade standard on ecology.
And it was particularly about food webs and food chains.
And they decided that their hook was going to be about invasive species and that their
unit was going to focus on the way invasive species can kind of come into an area and
mess up a food chain or mess up a food web.
And therefore sort of through that interaction, they would be teaching the students about
food webs and food chains.
So, they chose as their hook a piece of news footage about a bird called the monk parakeet
that has invaded our region of Connecticut, which one might not think that that’s such
a bad thing, but the monk parakeets are-- their native range is much farther south.
And to make it through the Connecticut winters, they build these massive colonial nests on
electrical transformers.
And huge masses of sticks and things.
And so this has caused some problems.
It makes it next to impossible for the electric utility workers to actually get to these transformers.
And I think there have been some cases of fires, as well, because of this.
Because they generate heat, and that’s why the birds are making their nests on them.
So, they’re more of nuisance species, but there is some real danger potential.
And so, this was an interesting news clip.
And I think it did really hook kids in and is still hooking kids in.
the great thing is that the teachers who went through this program are still using this.
They’re using it in a second, now third year.
And we’ve introduced this particular unit on food webs and food chains now to teachers
in three other schools who weren’t even involved in the project to begin with.
In every single case, it appears there’s a statistically significant improvement in
student performance after the use of the units that these teachers came up with-- with the
science units, in every case.�