This is my first day back in the office since attending the meeting
for Principal Investigators of LSC projects. I found the meeting
engaging and very informative. My thanks to all of you who shared
your work with me.
In talking with several Principal Investigators I began to realize how
many good ideas and resources that each had to offer, but had not
shared with all of the other Principal Investigators. For instance,
one Principal Investigator described an Innovation Configuration
Checklist that his project was developing to assess the degree to
which a classroom science program aligned with the vision of the
District science program. Several Principal Investigators remarked to
me and to other program officers that NSF should support a project to
serve as a conduit to share such ideas, resources, and lessons learned
from the Local Systemic Change Projects.
We have taken your suggestion seriously. In fact, NSF has funded a
mechanism for this purpose! This LSC ListServ and the WWW page for
the Local Systemic Change Projects are vehicles to support the sharing
of ideas, resources, and lessons learned among the community engaged
in Local Systemic Change Projects. I ask each of you to participate
in this exchange of information.
One topic that I heard discussed on several occasions focused on the
availability of instructional materials. I will take the initiative
to begin the sharing of information about instructional materials.
Shortly, I will post a message about the Eisenhower National
Clearinghouse for Science and Mathematics that provides a database of
abstracts of more than 8,000 sets of instructional materials in
science and mathematics for grades K-12. I also will post information
about an Inventory of Instructional Materials for Middle School
Science and about an NSF Review of Instructional Materials for Middle
School Science. I will post information about how to search the NSF
database of funded projects. I also will post an occasional
description of an NSF project, which is funded but not yet complete,
that is developing science instructional materials for grades K-8.
Other program officers will post similar descriptions about
mathematics projects and secondary science projects.
Each time that I post a message about instructional materials, I will
type instructional materials in the subject line of the message.
Everyone else posting information about instructional materials should
do the same. In that way, anyone wanting to locate all messages
related to instructional materials could go to the TERC WWW page for
LSC Projects and search the messages of the LSC Discussion List and
retrieve all messages related to instructional materials by searching
the list for that subject.
If you have read this far in the message and are still interested,
then I have some suggestions for how to organize the use of the LSC
ListServ:
1. Whenever you have information to share about an idea, resources, or
lessons learned post a short message about the information to the LSC
ListServ [teech_lsc@teech.terc.edu].
2. Use one of the following keywords (or create your own and announce
it to the ListServ) in your subject line of your message to help
organize the archive of messages:
a) Instructional Materials
b) Professional Development Materials c) Professional Development
Strategies d) Leadership Strategies/Resources
e) Student Outcomes
f) Assessment
g) Project Evaluation
h) Parent/Community Involvement
i) Administration Involvement
j) Public Relations
k) Research on LSC Projects
3. Make the information (e.g. assessment tool, article, description of
material) available to everyone in one of the following ways:
a) If you have the information in electronic form you can send it to
Joni Falk at [Joni_Falk@terc.edu] (who is the moderator for the LSC
WWW) and she will post it on the WWW page for the LSC Projects.
b) If you have the information on a WWW page, you can send Joni Falk
the WWW address and she will put a link to your WWW page on the WWW
page for the LSC Projects.
c) If you have the information only in hard copy format, then provide
your email address with your message and offer the opportunity for
individuals to contact you directly to get copies of the information
As a reminder, the TEECH project has a special area devoted to Local
Systemic Change projects on its Web site. We hope that you will
contribute to building up this area with us as a resource for the LSC
initiatives. Please visit the TEECH web site at
http://hub.terc.edu/terc/teech.html. You will find an archive of all
messages posted to the LSC ListServ and much additional information.
The TEECH project has the potential of being the vehicle by which we
capture and share all of the wonderful knowledge and "technologies"
generated by the LSC Projects. Please use it!
-Jim Ellis
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TEECH Local Systemic Change Mailing List
To send a response, send mail to teech_lsc@teech.terc.edu
Moderated by Jim Ellis <jellis@nsf.org>
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