Saturday, October 08, 2005

Science Teaching at CU

From today's Rocky Mountain News:

"$5 million in grants has been awarded to 2001 Nobel Prize Winner and CU professor Carl Wieman to help transform how college students learn science. The project will expand efforts now taking place where professors explore fewer topics, but in much more depth; get students collaborating in small groups; measure real-time understanding of ideas through infrared "clicker" quizzes; and assign homework that requires conceptual explanations. 'My goal is to do it worldwide, but you gotta start somewhere,' Wieman said."

Hmm, sounds familiar. I guess the Nobel Prize winner has college covered, it's up to us to transform high schools worldwide. Who's with me?

6 comments:

  1. This sounds amazing! Do you think it would be possible to contact him, let him know what we are doing, and maybe even visit his class? He might be able to provide us with some long range planning for our class.

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  2. Wow, how cool. I feel fortunate to be a part of a team that is forging into the future with education. I wonder if we could get him to come speak to us.

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  3. I particularly like his idea of exploring fewer topics, but in greater depth. The question, of course, is how do we do this when we seem to be limited by the requirements of our curriculum? The rest of this seems practical to me, but I'm not sure how to get past this issue.

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  4. I thought that we had these "clickers" at AHS. If we still do, could we run a training on these? Maybe at one of the inservice days.... I think that we, I, would use them if I could learn how they work. I think that it could be helpful to talk to some people that are using this technology and other types already.

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  5. World Language has a set of the clickers (part of their curriculum revision) - I'm sure Barb Kitch would be willing to demo them for us.

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  6. I'm with the rest of ya! I think it would be beneficial to get others' opinions and best practices on the issue. Let's forge ahead!

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