General Scheme of Training Workshops. All
Operation Primary Physical Science (OPPS) lead teams are
to participate in a total of 30 days of training
workshops over two years. The first workshop was 15 days
in duration and took place in the summer of 1996 at
Towson State College in Towson, Maryland.
The remaining 15 days of lead team training will occur
iover the course of 1997 and 1998. Participants receive
travel expenses, a subsistence allowance, and a stipend
from OPPS.
The spreading out of the training is deliberate and
allows team members to begin to teach teachers after
their first year. This scheme has been shown to enhance
the value of the lead teams' training in the second year.
The total duration of lead team training for OPPS is
roughly twice as long as that in Operation Physics
(OpPhys) and Operation Chemistry (OpChem). The longer
OPPS training allows for complete modeling of every
workshop for teachers that the teams subsquently will be
leading. OpPhys experience showed that this complete
modeling is important, as the lead teams had a tendency
to teach in nearly the same way they had been taught.
Content Areas and Materials. The content areas
focused on in lead team workshops and materials are all
in physical science workshop manuals that were designed
to be appropriate for and to meet the needs of elementary
school teachers of grades K-3. The content areas covered
are
- Describing Matter
- Interactions of Matter
- Energy and Matter
- Sound and Music
- Magnets
- Mirrors and Lenses
- Light and Color
- Moving Objects (including position, motion, and
forces)
- "Sun and Moon" (light and shadows and
patterns of change)
In each of these content areas, lead teams learn how
to deliver one 2-3 day workshop to their teachers. The
subject of "science as inquiry" is integrated
throughout. The depth of scientific treatment in the
manuals that accompany each workshop is similar to that
found in introductory college-level physics textbooks.
Training Workshops. Each workshop is 3-4 days
long and is suffused with the spirit and recommendations
of the National Science Education Standards.
Specifically, each workshop not only covers the
scientific content that teachers should know and
understand but also models the inquiry-centered, hands-on
approach that teachers are expected to learn and use with
their students.
Each workshop models a definite pedagogy--a learning
cycle that begins with "elicit, explore,
investigate, and apply" and ends with "assess
and reflect." The developers of the workshops view
this emphasis as a big improvement over the Operation
Physics approach. Seen as particularly valuable are the
"assess" and "reflect" steps of the
cycle. When "assessing," team members identify
what they learned; when "reflecting," they look
back at the discovery process by which they gained their
knowledge.
Lead teams also learn how to work with teachers on
translating the workshop material for the classroom. The
participants consider how children learn, what they think
and know, and what the National
Science Education Standards, state and local
frameworks, and the American Association for the
Advancement of Science's Benchmarks
for Science Literacy have to say. Then they
examine (and use) some widely used elementary science
curriculum materials, such as the Science and Technology
for Children units of the National Science
Resources Center, the Full-Option Science System
units developed by the Lawrence
Hall of Science, and Insights from the Education
Development Center.
As a final activity, the participants plan for K-3
students using the learning cycle.
At the end, the entire workshop is assessed by the
participants in light of one of the tables of
"Changing Emphases" from the National
Science Education Standards. This table lists
traditional pedagogical approaches (e.g. "focusing
on student acquisition of information") that are to
receive less emphasis and those (e.g. "focusing on
student understanding and use of scientific knowledge,
ideas, and inquiry processes") that are to receive
more. See p. 52 of the National
Science Education
