Nicholas Salvatore (left), a high school teacher from Spring, Texas; Cheryl Myers (center), a middle school teacher from the McAllen Independent School District in Texas; and Remy Poon (right), an elementary school teacher from Seattle, Wash., share views on a problem presented to their group from "The Art and Craft of Combinatorial Proofs" course at the Institute for Advanced Study in Park City, Utah. Credit: Ben Ditto

By putting teachers back into an intense learning and leadership environment, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is embarking on a major effort to improve the mathematics and science education of the nation’s youth.

The Teacher Institutes for the 21st Century program enlists K-12 teachers and school systems in an entirely new relationship with disciplinary faculty--university level science and math teachers. It encourages them to rethink math and science education in the classroom at all levels, and to evaluate both teacher and student progress. The program began in 2004 with a prototype at the Institute for Advanced Study in Park City, Utah. Seven new institutes are planned in 2005.

The new collaborations are built within the framework of NSF’s Math and Science Partnership (MSP) program and expect to bring a fresh look to a similar program that NSF supported from the 1950s through the late 1970s.

Lessons Learned

The institutes from the 1970s spawned a significant number of master teachers who experienced for the first time unprecedented opportunities to develop their skills at university education centers, thus giving them tools and techniques to enhance their teaching in the classroom. But the new generation of teacher institutes will take a different approach.

"When we talked about systems before, it was more about a culture change within K-12, with universities and institutes trying to "change" the teachers," says Joyce Evans, a program manager in the Directorate of Education and Human Resources. "Now we are talking about changing both, throughout the entire continuum in math and science education—K through 20. We not only want better student learning, but many of those who are selected to attend will become master teachers and also intellectual leaders," she says.

A weakness of the former institutes, according to Evans, was that "there was no evaluation afterward of the effectiveness of the training in terms of producing better teachers. We now give so much attention to evaluating students, to see if what we are doing is successful. Why not teachers?"