As reported in our Fall 1997 issue, the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), under the leadership of Marily DeWall, is "Building a Presence for Science" through a program of that name, which is hoped to include all American schools by 2000. Thus far Exxon Education Foundation has funded the program in ten states and the District of Columbia, and the planning meeting of stakeholders in science education in New Jersey was held at Liberty Science Center on 25 March. "Building a Presence for Science" in New Jersey
The goal of "Building a Presence for Science" is implementation of the National Science Education Standards. According to NSTA Executive Director Gerry Wheeler, this means having a copy of Standards in every American school -- much as the Gideons' goal is to have a Bible in every hotel room -- plus a "Point of Contact" in every school to serve as a resource to assist other teachers in using that copy. That network should be in place within a year, with the 25 March "stakeholder" meeting only the first of four phases oriented toward emplacing it -- in what Wheeler has characterized as a "pyramid" scheme.
The next phase is identifying, notifying, and training the "Key Leaders," who in the third phase will recruit and train the Points of Contact in the individual schools. Each Key Leader is responsible for 25 to 30 Points of Contact, and, in order to serve its 3200 schools, the New Jersey program, coordinated by Joseph G. Krajkovich, is looking for 110 Key Leaders, many of whom were nominated by the stakeholders at their 25 March meeting. At their training sessions, the Key Leaders will each receive a kit including a copy of Standards for each of the Points of Contact they will train, overhead transparencies, and a copy of the video in the Annenberg Foundation-funded Awareness Kit described in our Spring 1996 issue.
The last phase of "Building a Presence for Science" is the inservice training of all science teachers in each school by the school's Point of Contact. Although this is the culmination of "Building a Presence," which is an awareness program, it is also the beginning of the next step: for each teacher to determine in consultation with her/his school's Point of Contact, what additional professional development is needed to translate "awareness" of the Standards into their actual implementation. Thus, ideally, Points of Contact will need to be knowledgeable not only about the Standards but also about additional professional development teachers can draw on in order to implement them.
"Building a Presence for Science" is also intended to further the implementation of state science education standards as well as the national Standards, and Bruce Marganoff, Science Specialiast from the New Jersey Department of Education, was on hand to show how the two are related in New Jersey. Marganoff treated them as "two wallets" -- "It's good to have both," he said. As presented in draft form in our Fall 1994 issue, the New Jersey Science Education Standards consist of processes and content areas. One of the processes in the draft version, safety, has emerged as a cross-content standard that is now to be included in all the others; the other five have remained pretty much the same. The previous content area dealing with systems is now incorporated into the processes; the other seven content areas of the draft form remain, two in biological science, two in physical science, two in earth science, and one in the environment. Marganoff was especially proud of the environmental science standard, which he said had been a goal since 1971. He was also proud to state that the New Jersey Science Education Standards were one of only six among all the state science education standards to be rated "A" in a recent review commissioned by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, headed by Chester E. Finn, Jr., Assistant Secretary of Education under President Reagan.
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The TEACHERS CLEARINGHOUSE FOR SCIENCE AND SOCIETY EDUCATION