Grant to fund summer teacher training in nature studies
Janel Shoun |
Lipscomb University recently received a $56,800 grant to create a summer workshop for teachers in the Metro Davidson County and Tullahoma City schools districts, both designated as high-need districts.
“Teaching Nature on a Budget,” will be developed by Tamara Klingbyll, Lipscomb instructor in biology, and will be funded through an Improving Teacher Quality Grant, awarded by the Tennessee Higher Education Commission. The money originated through a grant from the federal No Child Left Behind program, designed to improve public education through teacher training.
The Tennessee Higher Education Commission granted 17 grants, totaling $1.3 million to eight universities for the 2006-07 academic year. Lipscomb was the only private university to receive an Improving Teacher Quality Grant this year.
Lipscomb’s one-week workshop will be held this summer and will accommodate up to 24 teachers from the Nashville and Tullahoma schools systems. Potential participating teachers will be identified by the two school districts and invited to attend, at no charge, by Lipscomb.
The workshop will teach elementary school teachers inquiry-based methods for teaching science through nature studies, said Klingbyll. They will also learn how to incorporate other subjects, such as math, English and art into the study of nature, Klingbyll said.
“Using these methods, students will be learning content in a different way and providing more feedback, which allows teachers to see what they already have in their knowledge banks and how they can add to that knowledge,” she said.
Later in the fall, Lipscomb faculty will follow up with the participating teachers to evaluate the effectiveness of the teaching methods they learned in the workshop.“This will be the third year that Lipscomb has played a role in improving the math and science education in the state’s public schools,” said Ben Hutchinson, dean of Lipscomb’s College of Natural and Applied Sciences. “The creative, hands-on techniques developed by our science faculty have been praised by the math and science teachers who previously went through our programs. We expect this new program on nature studies will be no exception.”
Previously, Lipscomb was awarded an Improving Teacher Quality Grant for a summer workshop on chemistry and computing in the 2004-05 academic year, and this past summer a teacher workshop in mathematics was also funded by another state grant.