HR: 09:00h
AN: ED21A-05    [PDF]
TI: Geology at Our Doorstep: Building a Partnership for Standards-Based Curriculum and Professional Development in Middle School Earth Science
AU: * Laursen, S
EM: sandra.laursen@colorado.edu
AF: Education Outreach, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado at Boulder, 216 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0216
AU: Lester, A
EM: alan.lester@colorado.edu
AF: Department of Geological Sciences, University of Colorado at Boulder, 399 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0399
AU: Cannon, E
EM: eric.cannon@colorado.edu
AF: Department of Geological Sciences, University of Colorado at Boulder, 399 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0399
AU: Forrest, A
AF: Department of Geological Sciences, University of Colorado at Boulder, 399 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0399
AU: Bencivengo, B
AF: Department of Geological Sciences, University of Colorado at Boulder, 399 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0399
AU: Hunter, K
EM: Hunter_Karen@stvrain.k12.co.us
AF: St. Vrain Valley School District, 395 South Pratt Parkway, Longmont, CO 80503
AB: Geology at Our Doorstep is a collaboration between a science outreach program (CIRES Outreach), students and faculty in a university geology department (U. Colorado at Boulder), and a local school district (St. Vrain Valley) to develop locally relevant geology classroom resources for use by the district's middle-school teachers. The project grew out of direct conversations with teachers about their ideas and needs and was explicitly based on district and state standards in Earth science and scientific thinking, drawing on close work with the district on standards implementation and assessment over the past two years. We intended to draw on existing curriculum resources and substitute local geologic examples to construct a "place-based" teaching resource. However, we found that generic, national-level curricula did not effectively match the rich geologic resources of our area, and instead developed a rather more substantial set of original materials, including classroom collections of regional rocks, reference materials on local geology, classroom activities, and media resources, all shared with teachers at a series of professional development workshops. While the original project was small in scale, a number of spin-off projects have evolved. This project models several important features in the development of university-K12 partnerships: consultation with districts, piloting of small projects, and the role of outreach programs in facilitating participation of university faculty and students.
UR: http://cires.colorado.edu/~k12/
DE: 6605 Education
SC: Education and Human Resources [ED]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting