The Lawrence Hall of Science will offer an opportunity to 80 upper-elementary school teachers in two San Francisco Bay Area schools (Oakland and San Mateo) to develop their leadership skills in the first component of the Science Update project. These teachers will be called the science impact teachers. The second component of the project will be an onsite development component in which the impact teachers inservice the other teachers at their schools. Forty teachers from twenty schools (Group A) will participate in a program extending over three years in which they will spend two weeks in the summer of year one, one week in each of summers two and three, followed by ten academic year meetings in between. The first summer will focus on the Science Update Course, the second summer on staff development methods and the third summer working with at least 200 of their peers under the tutelage of the LHS staff. During the second year a second group of forty teachers (Group B) will begin the replication of the process. Thus a total of 80 impact teachers will be trained to provide the educational and scientific resources necessary to improve the science education at their schools. The science content and methodology used will be drawn from the NSF-funded Full Option Science System (FOSS) materials. These materials are easy for teachers to use and are designed to be accessible to all students, including disabled, minority and disadvantaged. An amount equivalent to 23% of the NSF request has been cost-shared by the University, the school districts and the distributor of the FOSS materials.
