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LASER eNewsletter January 2011

Sharing best practices is a key attribute of any successful organization and/or partnership and highly effective organizations create systematic ways to identify and convert individual expertise, skills, and experience into organizational knowledge. When we look around, we see this happening everyday in the LASER partnership.

Even in these difficult economic times, we celebrate how we, as a Washington State LASER family, continue to leverage our knowledge and skills to improve science education. We believe this happens because our colleagues value building on each other's ideas and sharing their own insights on how best to improve learning and teaching.

Enjoy reading about our best practices.

Jeff and Sonia

In This Issue

Did You Know?

Alliances Utilize Technology

Administrator Support Makes A Difference

The Power of Partnership

Middle School Alignment Work Available

Institute for Systems Biology Recognized

Science Champions: Science Education Advocate Awards - Nominations Due January 24

Did You Know?
In November, the top five countries accessing the LASER website were: (1) United States - 10,731 (2) China - 2,483 (3) Russian Federation - 475 (4) United Kingdom - 298 and (5) Sweden - 268

Alliances Utilize Technology

Attending alliance meetings just got a whole lot easier for the members of the Southeast and Northwest (NW) LASER Alliances. This year, to boost attendance and to accommodate long travel distances, both alliances offered a K-20 video conference hook-up for their regularly scheduled governance meeting. The Northwest Alliance also offered telephone only participation.

"With folks participating from multiple sites and through the telephone, it was difficult to get a good conversation going this first time," said Joanne Johnson, NW Alliance Director, "however, the opportunity to participate without leaving their district was a wonderful option, given people's busy schedules and the distance to the ESD site."

Both Alliances emailed handouts ahead of time and worked with their ESD to provide the technical support. For more information on Governance Video Conference Meetings, contact: Joanne Johnson at jjohnson@nwesd.org or Kathy Fisk at kathy.fisk@ksd.org.

Administrator Support Makes A Difference

Jan 2011 Jim Merz, principal of Selah Intermediate School, explained his building's weekly schedule to a group of 50 science leaders from the South Central LASER Alliance (SCLA) on November 4 in Yakima. As part of the SCLA Science Leadership Network meeting, Jim shared the strategies that he and his building leaders are implementing to make a difference in student science performance. One strategy, making sure that students receive 90 minutes of mathematics, 90 minutes of language arts, and 90 minutes of science each day has made a tremendous impact. Results indicating an improvement over time in their 5^th grade WASL/MSP scores are shown below. To find out other strategies Selah is using, contact JimMerz@selah.k12.wa.us

Graph from Selah

The Power of Partnership

Jan 2011 Photo 2 "...partnerships between scientists and teachers can be a life changing event for the classroom teacher and an enjoyable break from laboratory work for the scientist," says Dr. Peggy Willcuts, former Walla Walla science specialist and now Program Lead for STEM Education Leadership, Outreach & Program Research, in the Science & Engineering Education Department at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and Alliance Co-Director for the Southeast LASER Alliance.

PNNL has a long history of partnering teachers and scientists in professional development. Currently offered are a series of content courses delivered by laboratory scientists and staff of the Education Department who act as a "bridge" between the worlds of science and the classroom. Classroom teachers partner with traditional lab scientists to deepen their own content knowledge and are then connected through a social network for follow-up contact and interaction. The content is not kit specific but rather organized around the "Big Ideas" of science that thread their way through a K-12 science program. Because teachers from many grade levels attend a workshop together, they hear from one another about how a concept is introduced in the early grades and is developed later in a student's education.

The partnership idea has caught on and now is expanding to include scientists and educators from WSU-Tri-Cities, Columbia Basin College and other local labs. To learn more about "partnerships", visit the PNNL website and read "Science-Teacher Partnerships as Professional Development: An Action Research Study" and/or contact Peggy Willcuts at: peggy.willcuts@pnl.gov.

Middle School Alignment Work Available

The Washington State LASER Middle School Alignment Project is now on the web! Mary McClellan lead a statewide team to create a document supporting the instructional alignment of the middle school curricular materials (FOSS, SEPUP, and STC) that met the criteria established for effective instructional materials.

For each module, teachers can review the alignment overview by selecting the "At A Glance" document. This At-a-Glance document provides a concise summary of how the instructional materials meet the standards. It is designed to be used by administrators and their staff to gain broad alignment information.

Each module is organized in two ways - lesson-by-lesson and by Washington Science learning standards. Mike Brown, ESD 105 Regional Science Coordinator, and the technology staff at ESD 105 determined how to sort the documents. The final report and all documents can be accessed at:

http://wastatelaser.org_support/MS_Project.htm.

Institute for Systems Biology Recognized
Congratulations to the Institute for Systems Biology's Center for Inquiry Science (CIS) for being named as one of the KCTS 9 recipients of the 2010 Golden Apple Award. Read more about the work of ISB at www.systemsbiology.org.

Science Champions: Science Education Advocate Awards - Nomination Due January 24, 2011

The deadline for the fifth annual Science Champions: Science Education Advocate Award nominations is quickly approaching and it's not too late to get your nomination submitted. This is an opportunity to help our community recognize that person or group that has gone above and beyond their job description to advocate for science education. Submissions are due by January 24, 2011; please visit the Washington State LASER website at http://www.wastatelaser.org/_awards/ for more information regarding the submission process.

The work of Washington State LASER would not be possible without the major support and funding of Pacific Science Center, Battelle, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the Washington State Legislature, Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, Boeing, and The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.