Original Vision

The original goals for Science CO-OP were not unlike those of all the other LSC projects: help teachers in the target school districts develop a better understanding of the science and pedagogical strategies needed to effectively implement the inquiry topics and materials for the FOSS, STC or Insights kits that they had chosen for their science curriculum. What distinguishes CO-OP from most other LSCs however, is that we had to make this happen simultaneously in 40 small, rural school districts scattered across about 40,000 square miles in Missouri and Iowa. Much like the strategy devised by small-scale farmers in the Midwest almost a century ago and still used today, we developed a "cooperative" plan in which the small districts could join forces and through which our project staff could effectively and economically provide services.

In order to provide for the large number of small school districts spread across such a large area, we envisioned developing school district leadership teams who could facilitate project activities and sustain professional development at the districts after the project had ended, offering multiple summer workshops at co-op sites central to clusters of the participating school districts where expert staff and consultants could deliver content and pedagogical instruction, enlisting part-time field support staff who could provide person-to-person contact with teams at the local districts, and utilizing point-to-point and multi-site interactive television strategies to provide participants access to experts and contact with project staff throughout the school year. One final thing that we envisioned was to promote the idea of "adaptation" versus "adoption" of science kits as a hook to get all preK-6 teachers in the buildings to work together and with other teachers in Science CO-OP on developing and sharing ways of connecting science inquiry activities across the curriculum. We promoted this adaptation and sharing process by having teachers develop "teacher resource books" (TRBs) to go along with the publisher kits and teacher guides.

We felt from the start that our plan to develop strong leadership teams at each of the small school districts and to focus on cross-curricular adaptation of science kits (i.e., building TRBs) would ensure continued interactions among teachers within school districts at worst and across school districts within the co-ops that we had formed at best. Our confidence was founded in our success in working with teachers in a single, multi-building district using a similar leadership model and adaptation (TRB) approach.

NEXT