High Leverage NASA Education & Public Outreach Teacher Professional Development Programs

A critical component of NASA Education and Public Outreach (E/PO) programs is to educate K-12 classrooms teachers in science content, inquiry-based methods of science teaching, and exemplary curriculum materials. Typical NASA E/PO programs accomplish this through workshops at teacher conventions, short courses at colleges and universities, teacher camps during the summer, etc.. These programs are extremely valuable, but unfortunately they have a low ratio of number of teachers reached to time spent by E/PO professionals in developing and organizing the programs. We have addressed this problem in two ways. First, in partnering with organizations that already conduct extensive teacher professional development (PD) programs, such as the Lawrence Hall of Science, we can reduce the amount of time spent in preparing for our own programs. Second, we target our PD programs for teachers and administrators who are committed to conducting their own PD programs for their colleagues. In this way we can highly leverage the limited resources of a given E/PO program to impact far more teachers, and hence students, than could ever be reached personally by individual E/PO professionals.