HELPING BUSY SCIENTISTS BUILD INFORMAL GEOSCIENCE EDUCATION AT STANFORD'S SCHOOL OF EARTH SCIENCES

With a need and desire to provide more educational outreach programs, the School of Earth Sciences has begun a concerted effort to provide support and guidance for faculty. Innovative programs such as Geokids for first grade students had been overseen by busy scientists. Now, a dedicated staff member and outreach graduate assistantships support and offer new ideas to programs. This will allow the school to foster relationships with a broader community and create sustainable programs. In addition, a menu/catalog with outreach ideas and opportunities is being developed. In the world of NSF's broader impacts criteria, this will assist faculty in proposal development and implementation. Graduate students have expressed a desire for more teaching and Geokids provides them with this opportunity. Within Stanford's Environmental Molecular Science Institute, teacher workshops are offered in partnership with scientists and an education researcher. The combination of geoscience content and science pedagogy creates professional development that complements the realities of high school classrooms. Science instruction includes both the process of understanding and the language to represent the ideas. An instructional method has been developed to teach science by attempting to simplify science discourse, thus reaching the broad audience in a classroom.