Implementing new curriculum materials is an important focus of most LSC projects. This is effective because they see someone who has actually used the kits in the classroom with real students. The teacher-leaders can get to the heart of what new participants need to know and what really works. It is imperative that the teacher-leaders minimize their lecturing and model what the activities should look like. We have the teacher-leaders present in pairs so that one can always monitor how much lecturing is occurring and push toward the demonstration.
Participants attend one-week summer institutes and two days each academic year for kit training.
Although they are more brief, the academic-year days are the core of the training. This works because at that point, we are trying to get the teachers interested and involved. Then we have science experts present the science content at separate summer and academic-year sessions. Overall, the teachers seem to like the kits. We did have a bit of resistance from one small group of teachers, but we met together with their superintendent and discussed their concerns and how we could address them.