What happens when you put 150 teachers from 23 states and three countries in the same room for three days with a team of instructors who are over-the-top excited about teaching science? Enthusiasm for making science fun spreads like a virus. Concerns about test scores, curriculum changes or the ever-changing pressures of being a teacher seem to vanish. For three days, these teachers put their worries aside and focus on ways to bring wonder, discovery and exploration back into their classrooms.
Not all of the participants who come to Science in the Rockies start out loving science. Hilary Vanderveen admits she was a student who didn’t like science all that much, but this experience taught her how to avoid that attitude in her classroom. Vanderveen believes the key is raising the “I wonder factor” in her students’ minds as they approach various scientific questions.
To the untrained eye, it might look like teaching science is all fun and games, but there’s a serious side to all of this fun. Many of the participants at this year’s event shared the same fears and concerns that were raised even three years ago – science education is slowly becoming an extra-curricular activity in many schools across the country. With so much pressure being put on reading, writing and math scores on state achievement tests, some elementary teachers are forced to put science on the back burner until early Spring when state testing in other curriculum areas is finished. With help from the instructional team at Science in the Rockies, our goal is to help teachers focus their efforts on integrating science into their everyday curriculum.
Wendy Liddell came all the way from New Zealand to Science in the Rockies to bring back ideas for the science class she teaches in Singapore. “When a teacher is inspired by science, the children are inspired. Children’s minds are the most wonderful gift that we have. The children that we teach today are our future. The ideas, the philosophies and the inspirations that we give them will be the world that we have in the next century,” says Liddell.