21 May 2014

A challenge and offer

The challenge is for a science teacher to incorporate Science and/or Nature in to their teaching.  The offer is that I'll pay for the subscription(s) for at least the first year.  US High School teachers only (sorry others, but I'll exercise provincialism here).  First come first served.

The prompting here is that I've been reading some of my backlogged Science and Nature issues.  Some articles are past almost all K-12 students (though not some I was talking to at Eleanor Roosevelt High School's Research Practicum celebration, so even the most rarefied will be useful in some institutions).  But there are research article summaries which don't require such a high level of background.  And I think a talented enough teacher can make good use of the wealth of material in each issue of Science and Nature.

The third leg of the tripod, so to speak, is that I'll invite some discussion as to exactly how a (US) grade 9-12 teacher can make use of professional journals like Science and Nature.  I know I have a teacher or two in the readership, and look forward to their ideas.

Update 5/27/2014: I've now got a taker, @ragbag01 on twitter.  But discussion of how to make use of the subscription is still very welcome (per anonymous1). 

Anonymous2 notes http://scienceintheclassroom.org/ has some free materials for the classroom on selected papers.

An article of mine on language and reading science may also be useful -- Science Jabberwocky

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am a long time subscriber and reader of SCIENCE and a number of other peer-review journals. I offered to provide them to area colleges and universities, with no takers. The local High School, however, regularly accepts them.

Unfortunately, High School teachers are often not trained or capable of making good use of the information in these journals. I think that a program that provides teachers with lesson plan for using such information would be far more useful than a subscription to a journal.

Anonymous said...

Just fyi, Science has a relatively new online (and free) resource in which editors work with the authors to provide teaching materials based on select Science papers. It's called Science in the Classroom (http://scienceintheclassroom.org/).