Earth System Science Education Alliance (ESSEA) II

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The Earth System Science Education Alliance (ESSEA) is supporting colleges and universities in teacher preparation and professional development for pre-service, middle and high school teachers. This program builds and expands on the successful ESSEA program that was originally funded by NASA and implemented by the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) from 2000-2005. The IGES team is enhancing and building on this foundation by: 1) Using the ESSEA online courses as a model to introduce newly upgraded Earth system science undergraduate and graduate courses; 2) Introducing extensive use of data, models and existing Earth system educational materials to support the teacher courses; 3) Disseminating model teaching practices and program success through annual conferences, continuing support, and presentations at geoscience and education conferences; and 4) Expanding the number of participating institutions from 17 to 40. The IGES team provides ongoing support to participating colleges and universities through: building their capacity to deliver exceptional teacher preparation and professional development to a national audience; providing them with evaluation tools to ensure that trained teachers have a strong understanding of Earth system science content and how to effectively teach it; and assisting them in creating an infrastructure capable of sustaining this exceptional program. A salient feature of the ESSEA program is to introduce an active, student-centered teaching model to both university faculty and to pre-service, middle, and high school teachers. The ESSEA courses address teachers' needs in the areas of geoscience content, technology, educational resources, and new teaching methods. This is accomplished by immersing teachers in a knowledge-building community in which they conduct research, learn new content, expose their thinking to critical analysis, and develop new activities. Evaluation of project activities will be used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the ESSEA model for teacher training and professional development and its potential to be successfully scaled up, institutionalized, and sustained at a larger number of institutions.