The reason why I decided to do this program is because it s different. Teaching,
you constantly want to learn. Instead of teaching summer school, I wanted to get more experience
since I teach 8th grade physical science. The subject is basically lab and doing research
and pulling data, analyzing data, I wanted to get more experience with that and that
would be me actually working in the lab and getting hands-on experience from real researchers.
Here at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, our teacher programs are really focused on
having teachers become researchers themselves. So, they do an eight-week program where they
are actually paired with a mentor, they do a project that s actually doing research and
then we have weekly meetings that help them to transfer that experience to the classroom.
My approach as a mentor is to craft a research experience for each teacher that s tailored
to what they re interested in and the skill level that they bring to the lab. The lab
considers it our responsibility to also train the next generation of scientists and the
Department of Energy certainly believes that the key to prosperity for the country is actually
our scientific and technological inventiveness and innovation. To train teachers to understand
science and communicate it with passion to the students who would be the next generation
of scientists is really investing in their own future. The one project that you ll now
see, we are trying to help figure out what is the best set of fuel efficient stoves that
should be taken to Haiti in the reconstruction effort. There are close to a hundred non-profit
organizations trying to distribute stoves in Haiti, but they don t have any ability
to test which stoves are fuel-efficient, and we have offered to do that. As a teacher,
I love this; it s great. It gives me an opportunity to stay involved with current science. In
terms of bringing it to my students, I could show them the way that what I m teaching them
and what they re learning, is used in everyday situations for things that they don t really
connect science with. The Livermore Lab sponsors its own teacher research academy and teachers
come here to gain experience and develop their content knowledge and do research internships.
We ve developed our program based upon the input from some master teachers and one of
the things they have told us over the years is science teachers need content knowledge.
So, our focus is on how do we get the laboratory content knowledge out of the research laboratories
and into the hands of teachers so they can pass it onto their kids? So, we have these
master teachers who have learned the content, they teach the course and then we bring these
scientists in for guest lecture, provide tours and talk about their cutting edge research.
re actually extracting our own DNA from our cheek cells and then we are putting that into
PCR and we are magnifying or multiplying the DNA strands. I think our students are interested
in things that relate to them, that they can say, hey this is my DNA and I want to know
what s going on or they can understand how they saw it on CSI on TV, then it s relevant
to them. Being involved in the lab has allowed me to really develop a much better understanding
of how science is conducted. Before entering into this internship, I had never actually
had a real, scientific research experience. I got to bring that experience back to my
classroom as a science teacher that actually does science, which I think means a lot to
the kids. I think they see validity in a science teacher that carries out science that they
may not see otherwise and so I think it strengthens my profession to have this kind of exposure
to real science research. hE4K hE4K gdE4K gdE4K [Content_Types].xml Iw}, $yi} _rels/.rels
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