Tomorrow's Science Today: Preparing for the Next Pandemic

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Project Summary This project – Tomorrow’s Science Today: preparing for the next pandemic – will create a professional development experience for high school science teachers focused on infectious diseases and the molecular technologies that are being used to control them. The project consists of two distinct phases. In the first, we will create a variety of hands-on instructional materials – composed of both foam-based schematic models and accurate 3D-printed models of proteins – to bring to life molecular stories of the process of science. We will use a framework that emphasizes how the foundational concepts of molecular biology established in the past (Yesterday’s Science) provides the basis for the amazing technology that has been brought to bear on the current SARS-Cov-2 pandemic (Today’s Science) and also lays the ground-work for even more powerful defenses in the future (Tomorrow’s Science). In the second phase of this project, we will create a professional learning experience in which the project’s instructional materials will be introduced to high school science teachers. The project’s goals are (i) to increase the teachers’ content knowledge regarding the molecular mechanisms of infectious diseases and (ii) to model for the teachers a student-centered active learning pedagogy that values questions over answers. The project features a formal teacher empowerment program in which a small group of veteran teachers are trained to serve as mentors for teachers who are new to the project. High school biology and chemistry teachers will be recruited into this project via presentations and exhibits at state, regional and national meetings of science educators. A plan is in place to proactively accept teachers from schools with a significant population of underserved minority students. And finally, the broad dissemination of the project’s instructional materials will be achieved through our established partnerships with other science outreach organizations whose programs focus on URM students in urban Milwaukee, Chicago and rural Nebraska and South Dakota.