Hi, my name is Sharon Simpson. I was one of the team that developed
and then produced the Biodiversity Counts curriculum. This
is actually the web site, which you can get if you go through the
main portal of the museum, www.amnh.org.
It is a password-protected site, though, so you'll only see this.
Unfortunately, I didn't order my Internet connection early enough,
so you're just going to have to look at this flash screen and I won't
be able to show you the site. But I'll describe it. As Myles said,
one of the challenges with biodiversity is trying to make it local,
and what we were attempting to do here was to produce something for
middle-school students that would make the topic real to them. So
Biodiversity Counts is very much biodiversity in your own neighborhood
and also, as Myles was saying, it's everywhere. Biodiversity is everywhere—you
just have to go out and look for it. With that in mind, the curriculum
was developed and designed to be able to be used anywhere in the country
and, in fact, has been used in all kinds of different environments.
To just give you a very basic idea of what it is: students working
with their teachers find a research site somewhere near their school-it
can even be in the school grounds. Students go out, divide the areas
into two-by-two meter square plots, and then, working in groups of
two or three, they look and see what they've got there. They record
in field journals what they see there, and then they come back into
the classroom and discuss their findings and they identify the insects
and spiders and plants that they see there. Then they go to the web
site where there's a national database where they can enter data on
what they found out in the field, and they can share that with other
students across the country and look at what other students have found.
Now, the idea of this is to give students a hands-on opportunity to
go out and look in their own backyard, to explore their own biodiversity,
and then hopefully from there to extrapolate out to looking at biodiversity
on a state level and a national level and then on a global level.
To make them better informed and better concerned citizens.
The curriculum was developed, as Myles was saying, very much in the
spirit of all the things that we develop museum-wide. Again, we had
a lot of input from our friends in the Center for Biodiversity. I
think absolutely everybody in that department helped in one way or
another, but we had a lot of very close guidance from Eleanor Sterling
and from Liz Johnson, who were part of our development team. We met
on a regular basis, and they read everything we produced. They were
good critical readers who gave us interesting and valuable feedback.
We had two other museum scientists who were very involved: Amy Berkov,
whom I know you've already met and are working with, and Kefyn Catley.
And the four scientists, myself, and a team of five teachers—Bob
Wallace from New York City; Linda Beyt from Lafayette, Louisiana;
Sam Neri from Syracuse, New York; Tim O'Halloran from Tulsa, Oklahoma;
and Karen Spaulding from Cambridge, Massachusetts—were a wonderful
part of our development team. They came to meetings. They read things.
They gave us lots and lots of good constructive criticism. They tested
activities and readings with their students and gave us their feedback.
Also on the team we had a curriculum writer, another writer and other
editorial people, and then, of course, technology people, because
the curriculum is in two parts. It's a web site and it's also a teacher's
guide. So again, we integrated technology throughout the materials.
To give you a little bit of history of the implementation, the first
pilot test was about four years ago in not too many schools. Then
we had a slightly larger one in about 30 schools. Last year, we ran
it in over 100 schools, and from that we managed to get a lot of data
on some interesting things. One of the things that happened organically
was the school district of Cambridge, Massachusetts, came to us and
asked if they could implement the program in the district as part
of their life sciences middle-school program. That provided a great
model for us, as well as a very interesting group of people to work
with. Out of that, we came to the realization that actually running
it at the district level was better for everybody. It was obviously
easier for us because there aren't very many of us here trying to
run the whole thing. But it was a much better experience for the teachers
because then they could have real support within their own community,
not just from their peers who were also running the program, but also
from their technology coordinators and administrators at the district
level. From that we experienced a model of working with several other
districts and ran some workshops.
We had three different workshops: one in Tulsa, Oklahoma; one in Lafayette,
Louisiana; and one up in Cambridge. And Kefyn Catley came to two of
those. Amy came to one. We took the teachers into the field, and they
did the same things that their students would be doing—getting
down on their hands and knees and looking for bugs and plants, taking
them back to the lab, and then working with the scientists to identify
what they had found. We provided some technology training in order
to use the web site. So we learned a lot from doing those workshops,
including the fact that we weren't very good at doing the technology
side of it, because it is actually a lot more complicated than we
think it is when we sit here with our T1 lines and everybody on top-of-the-line
Macs or PCs. You go to schools and it's a completely different ballgame.
Lots of classrooms have one computer with an Internet connection,
or maybe the only computer with an Internet connection in the school
is in the library. So that was a good eye-opener for us, a good reality
check, and also pretty humbling because it was amazing what teachers
could do with very limited resources. But it also made us aware of
the fact that the actual materials were what was working for teachers,
rather than the technology side of it. So this year, we're again piloting
with some schools and are trying to get more detailed feedback on
exactly how the curriculum works in terms of learning. We know that
teachers really, really like it. We know that students really, really
like it. But we haven't actually figured out what people are learning.
The materials are vast—we got very enthusiastic and carried away
when we developed the whole thing. The Teacher's Guide is about 300
pages long, which is exciting, and we get wonderful feedback from
that, but, as you are all aware, 300 pages is a hell of a lot of stuff
to try to get through! It's interesting to watch how teachers adapt
that and use it. Of course, all good teachers do that with anything
you give them, but we're trying to get some good data back from that
and figure out if there are ways we can help less experienced teachers
get through the materials successfully. We have had a lot of very
positive feedback. Probably the nicest feedback that any of us on
the team get is when we actually go to school and see students implement
it. And I think, for me, the most exciting experiences have definitely
been in urban schools. I'm a very urban person myself and grew up
in the middle of the city. But it's very exciting to go out there
with a bunch of kids who think there's nothing where they live—especially
if you have someone like Kefyn Catley with you—and within 15
minutes all the kids are scrambling around on their hands and knees
with little vials trying to catch as many bugs as they can and trying
to figure out what they've got there. That sums up the spirit of the
whole thing for me, just to awaken that feeling in students and see
it start to blossom.
