9555677 Radford Project Life focuses on the rural and poor in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, and is a professional development program for middle grades and high school teachers of life sciences, focuses on ecology, environmental science, and organismal biology. The 4-year program is designed to provide 124 hours per teacher of inservice training in science content and reform methodologies to a total of 192 teachers in 3 locations. Sixty of the teachers and 6 interns will receive an additional 90 hours of additional leadership training to prepare them to become workshop leaders and change agents. The project strives to develop: teachers sufficiently to enhance their understanding of science concepts and inquiry pedagogical skills. Teachers have strong administrative support for systemic change, and resources that allow local systems to independently continue the systemic change begun by the project. The Project will purchase kit materials with which to provide professional development. Equally important however, that teachers will be sufficiently enhanced to transport science process skills across various disciplines and concepts. This proposal is a request to clone what the PI's claim is a successful TE project. Scientists and science educators (interns) will be recruited, and paid a summer stipend, to become part of a team - the members of which are classroom teachers. The interns will participate in summer workshops alongside classroom teachers. Efforts will be made to have at least two teachers from each participating school work as a team and collaborate on the sharing of ideas and site based problem-solving. The rationale for disseminating this project in the three targeted states based on their rural similarity to the original Louisiana site out of which outcomes were successful and funded by LaSIP. The participating SSI's support this project. They have not however, offered cash.
