PATHWAYS TO SUCCESS: FOUR YEARS EXPERIENCE IN EARTH SYSTEM SCIENCE FOR K-9 TEACHERS

Industrialized society has increasingly separated most of us from the natural world, and our efforts in teacher preparation are an attempt to reconnect urban teachers to the natural world. For the past four years, a two year community college and a graduate school of education have been engaged in the professional development program of K-9 teachers in Earth System Science (ESS) education. This project has been funded by the US department of Education's No Child Left Behind program and more recently, by additional funding from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. Since year one, we have developed three separated courses now offered each year in ESS curriculum including an introductory overview of ESS, a course in water resources in ESS, and advanced topics in ESS focusing on Minnesota geology, earth history, rivers, lakes, and environmental issues. In the past four years our enrollment has grown dramatically from 16 to 45 teachers per year and we have developed a multidisciplinary instructional team of four instructors. Our project not only includes cooperative team based learning for our participants but also cooperative team-based multidisciplinary teaching. As instructors for these courses, my colleagues and I have discovered critical ingredients for pathways to success in providing hands-on and minds-on instruction that focuses on scientific inquiry investigations and discovery oriented activities in which our K-9 teachers work as peers in cooperative team settings. We developed outdoor and field based investigations and hand-on activities that give teachers authentic experience of science inquiry based on the beliefs that effective learning happens when learners can connect ESS dynamics to the context of the urban environment that they live in. We have discovered that it is important for teachers to feel that we meet them where they are in terms of their content knowledge and help them construct new and deeper understandings of earth science content knowledge and ESS instructional modalities. In assessing the impact of our project, we found that teachers are more willing to take risks and experiment with new teaching strategies including inquiry-based, cooperative team-based, and contextualized teaching.