In a joint effort, the School of Education and the Department of Biology at Indiana University, Bloomington, will provide a six-week workshop on recent developments in biology for 30 in-service high school biology teachers during the summer of 1989. The workshop will be followed by several efforts to help the teachers incorporate what they have learned into their teaching programs. Four topics will be emphasized in the workshop: 1) human genetics, 2) molecular biology and molecular genetics, 3) immunology, and 4) biochemical techniques. Instructors will start at the level where most participants seem to be and by the end of the session try to introduce considerable recently discovered information. Lecture and discussion time will be devoted to each topic, but of equal importance will be the laboratory component, which will consist of two elements. One will be exercises used to demonstrate principles and examples that are usual in a college-level lab setting. The second will be labs that should be suitable for demonstrating some essential elements of the material in a high school lab situation. This will provide the in-service teachers with ideas and expertise that they can incorporate rather directly into their own teaching programs. The in-service teachers will be asked to help with the development of the latter exercises, thus helping generate a self-confidence that they can adapt these exercises for their own situations. Several efforts will be made to ensure that the workshop has an impact on teaching. The teachers will all come from Indianapolis and the southern half of Indiana, making it possible for them to communicate relatively easily with each other and with the workshop faculty after the workshop. During the school year 89-90, teams of workshop faculty will visit the schools of the participants, serve as resources regarding the content and nature of modules being tried in the high schools, and encourage administrators to be supportive of these teachers. This program is the first to offer the High School Biology teachers of Indiana the opportunity of expanding their knowledge base in several important topics. This broad approach will better able the teachers to improve many areas of their curriculum. Indiana University has contributed an amount equal to 13% of the National Science Foundation award.
