About CELEST
What is CELEST?
CELESTial Manifesto
Mission
Thrusts
Overview
Virtual Tour
People
Faculty
Staff
Participating Institutions
External Advisory and Scientific Review Board
Diversity Outreach Committee
Educational and
Scientific Resources
Curriculum Materials
Scientific Materials
NEWS: CELEST Begins Outreach to Schools Nationwide (by Paul Trunfio)
For two weeks this summer, twenty middle school, high school and college teachers from twelve states across the country came to Boston University to experience first-hand the CELEST educational curriculum. The July 9-20, 2007 workshop was held during weekdays at Boston University's Executive Leadership Center and was led by CELEST education Outreach Director Paul Trunfio and Curriculum Director Dan Franklin along with mentor teachers Ana Caldeira and Karen Woods from Somerville High School. The workshop was an immersive social, scientific, and educational outreach effort that was designed to forge relationships among all participants and to assist teachers to better understand the properties and functions of the human brain, to gain in their abilities to teach brain content, and to increase their skills in using software modules in teaching brain content.
The workshops introduced five modules developed by CELEST Education: Brightness Lab, Sequence Learning, Associative Learning, Recognition, and Obstacle Avoidance; all of which are drawn directly from the research thrusts and incorporate a psychophysical interactive experiment and modeling. Modules help address national and state science and mathematics standards in the context of motivating content about how we learn. The modules, which are still under development, are the result of collaborations between faculty, staff, graduate students, and master teachers. Each module began with motivational lectures and demonstrations by CELEST researchers so that participating teachers could see the modules in both their educational and research contexts. Participants then worked in the same fashion as their students, using the developed materials and offering feedback for improvement. After each module, there were group discussions on how the modules could be adapted to the particular classes that participants taught.
In addition to the module work, there was a full-day workshop given by Alene Harris from Vanderbilt University on incorporating the “How People Learn” framework into educational materials. This was important because a significant fraction of the teacher participant's time was spent developing their own lesson plans that they could then bring back to their schools and implement. Teachers worked in small groups from two to four based on likeminded interests and the workshop built in methods (e.g., “Chalk Talk”) for teachers to share ideas between groups. The workshop concluded with a “conference” in which teacher groups introduced their lesson plans through interactive PowerPoint presentations.
The workshop is only the beginning of CELEST's interactions with these teachers. Teachers now are beginning to implement the materials they worked on this summer through “action research projects” while supported by CELEST through a collaborative website. Action research focuses on teaching first while collecting research data that is not too demanding on the teacher's time. By working collaboratively with summer workshop participants, CELEST hopes to collect a wealth of data from a wide range of implementations that will help evaluate the effectiveness of the modules, while at the same time help guide classroom change.
