Our purpose was to use the CBW curriculum as a basis for developing model workshops for teacher trainers who are giving workshops on CBW or other inquiry-based science curricula. The first workshop took place in Ithaca at the Lab of Ornithology with 15 teachers representing nine nearby school districts. During October and November, we took the workshop on the road to 75 teachers recruited by NAS environmental education specialists. Audubon also invited local chapter members to participate, meet the teachers, and serve as mentors to participating classrooms. In January and February, we again gathered teachers and local Audubon chapter members to each of the workshop sites and presented one-day workshops focusing on data analysis.
Students can now retrieve data from our web site and download it to computers at their schools.
From the workshops, we learned that teachers are enthusiastic about Classroom BirdWatch and that they use the curriculum in many different ways. All in all, the workshops were enthusiastically received, and most participating teachers are eager to use Classroom BirdWatch again. We are currently writing a manual about presenting workshops that will highlight what we have learned. We hope this manual will enable other teachers to present workshops featuring the CBW curriculum and will serve as a model for workshops about other inquiry-based curricula .