THE STANYS BIG IDEA TEACHER INSTITUTE SERIES (STANYS-BITIS) PART 1

This session is the first of two connected sessions. The major reports that find the current state of science education in the United States inadequate are too numerous to count. The curriculum is an inch deep and a mile wide. How can we balance depth and breadth? Is there a set of fundamental Earth Science concepts that is reasonable for every high school graduate to understand? What ideas would be included? Could a small set of ideas be framed so that it would serve as an umbrella for everything you might teach in an introductory course? Discerning “Big Ideas” (Miller & Duggan-Haas, in review) within the content area may hold the answer to these questions. Institute participants will be asked to distill their content into a small set of major or fundamental themes or big ideas that crosscut content but recur as foundational aspects of the entire course. An example set of “Big Ideas” for Earth Science include; The Earth system is a complex adaptive system. The flow of energy drives the cycling of matter. Humans and the environment impact each other. Evolution and uniformity define the earth system. To understand (deep) time and the scale of space, models are necessary.