There are countless aspects of the Kenan Fellows externship I love. Among them is the planning Dr Beasely and our team are doing to put real-world science in the hands of our students.

Developing plans that are teacher friendly and exciting to our students, based on our mentor’s research study is somewhat challenging. It is forcing us to rethink the our roles as teachers to become scientists and facilitators.

We are boiling down our lab experiences to make them feasible and accessible for middle school teachers and students everywhere. One of the contretemps we face is the need to explore alternative methods and resources  that will reduce the cost of our data collection experiments. We’re getting good at improvising and adapting, another unexpected benefit of this experience.

As we continue to work through the classroom adaptations we are guided by the question of how these experiences could be used to complement the overall study as it progresses. The answer, of course, is to lead students to collect relevant and useful observations that can be collected over time in a variety of locations. We are ambitious but we also believe we can teach students lab protocols and observation skills that Dr. Beasely can add to her collective analysis. As we construct our lesson plans, I can easily imagine our students becoming scientists involved with state-wide data collection.

Our ultimate goal, however, seems even more ambitious. Once we can perfect and package our plans this study could go far beyond our state. With the dedicated collaboration of our team I envision a day when we could take this world-wide. Only then can we hope to create true global citizens of science.