Louisiana Tech Enhancing Scientific Teaching (LaTEST) seeks to develop and present a unique professional development program for fifty classroom teachers in Ouachita Parish and up to twenty teacher candidates from Louisiana Tech. The proposed design includes a two-week summer institute featuring 60 hours of intensive immersion in inquiry-based science instruction. During the institute, content area experts, COE faculty, and selected master teachers will model reform based instructional strategies designed to increase participant content knowledge and demonstrating the effective integration of science kits and other resources in the classroom.

This project will do more than provide ideas for activity based lesson planning, it is intended to help teacher candidates and practicing teachers in modifying “the structure of preexisting cookbook labs, asking questions, incorporating appropriate wait time, carefully listening, acknowledging, and playing off student ideas” to foster an inquiry based learning environment. This project will incorporate the findings of one study which suggest that: Teacher candidates must understand that “effective laboratory experiences are highly interactive and make explicit students’ relevant prior knowledge, engender active mental struggling with that prior knowledge and new experiences, and encourage metacognition.

 In order to maximaze the effectiveness of the proposed professional development project, the LaTEST design includes an additional 30 hours of academic year follow-up to the summer institute. These follow-up sessions will be used to

(1) analyze the effectiveness of new strategies being employed as a result of the project;

(2) provide additional content instruction;

(3) provide teacher candidates with opportunities to design and present lessons in collaboration with the classroom teachers; and

(4) to give participants an opportunity to design presentations for delivery to other faculty at their school sites or other school sites.

Teacher candidates participating in this project will assigned a partner teacher in whose classroom they will complete ten hours of observations including at least one hour of actual teaching which will be observed and evaluated by project staff. The project design also calls for three classroom observations to be conducted by project staff and Ouachita Parish personnel. These observations will be conducted as follows:

Observation 1: Project staff members observe to ensure implementation of strategies and effective utilization of project provided resources by classroom teachers

Observation 2: Project staff members observe teacher candidates presenting lessons consistent with project goals to students of classroom teacher participants

Observation 3: Ouachita Parish staff observe participating teachers in the classroom using the Louisiana Components of Effective Teaching observation protocol to determine alignment of strategies with district goals and objectives for this project.

Through this project, participating teachers will be provided the remaining science kits needed to adequately support instruction using the newly adopted Harcourt Science textbooks. These kits, produces by Harcourt, have been shown to positively impact student achievement in science. The success of Florida students, as evidenced by test scores on the grade five Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test: Science (FCAT), demonstrates the effectiveness of the kits to raise science achievement test scores. After two years of science kit use clear score gains were noted. The results demonstrated significant (p,.0001) gains at all SES and ethnic groups.  Ouachita Parish has determined that the Harcourt kits can effectively be used by their classroom teachers to successfully implement the Model Curriculum Framework. Test scores of classes that used the physical science kits showed improvement in physical science scores.