The new funding from Dreyfus and Lucent gives the program the resources to provide intensive, mentored research opportunities for 36 high-school chemistry teachers. Every year, each institution will select three new teachers in the chemical sciences from high schools within easy driving distance from the campus. For about eight weeks during the summer, faculty members will adopt the teachers as regular members of their laboratories, giving them research assignments alongside graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. They will return the following summer for another eight weeks, as three new teachers join them. During the school years following their research, participants from all six institutions will gather for quarterly meetings to discuss their experiences and describe their plans to incorporate their insights into their teaching.
Independent research is central to science.
Yet most high school teachers of science have prepared for their work in a system that emphasized textbook knowledge almost exclusively and separated teaching science from doing science. Often they have not had the experiences that allow them to convey the process and excitement of discovery to students. For Louis Gatto, a chemistry teacher at Hunterdon Central Regional High School who is working in Bocarsly's lab this summer, the experience has completely changed his perception of research. Being here I am actually seeing science in action. When I come in every day, we don't know what's going to happen.