Teachers’ Domain Launches Professional Development Site

Picture a classroom of students, led by an enthusiastic
teacher, actively exploring how bird beak structures affect diets or
replicating Galileo’s gravity experiments, assisted by video clips
from award-winning science documentaries and interactive online
activities.

Teachers’ Domain Professional Development, a series of online courses for K-12
educators, provides teachers with exciting multimedia resources for
their classrooms, enhances their knowledge of science concepts, and
presents effective methodologies and strategies for inspiring
students.

Teachers’ Domain Professional Development courses integrate inquiry
learning with streaming video and interactive experiences from
award-winning public television science programs and Web sites,
including NOVA, ZOOM, and A Science Odyssey. Using this model,
teachers discover first-hand how stimulating learning with multimedia
can be.

The media, coupled with thought-provoking activities and opportunities
to enter online discussions with peers, were designed to increase
teachers’ breadth and depth of content knowledge in science and, by
extension, improve student achievement in science.

The first three courses available are Teaching Elementary Life
Science, Teaching Elementary Physical Science, and Teaching Middle
School Life Science. Additional courses, including those for high
school teachers, are expected to launch in 2005. All course content
corresponds to the National Science Education Standards and the MCREL
Compendium of K-12 Standards.

"The courses are designed to assist teachers in two ways - to expand
their knowledge of science concepts and to provide a range of
effective strategies for use in teaching those concepts," explains Ted
Sicker, Executive Producer. "And the multimedia format of Teachers’
Domain Professional Development provides the optimal model for
scientific exploration - using a range of resources beyond the
textbook."

Teachers who completed the Teaching Elementary Life Science course
described the curriculum as fully developed, well-organized, and
thought-provoking. "This online science course has been the most
beneficial professional course I have ever taken!" exclaimed one
participant. "The course design gives teachers a great background on
the concepts and outstanding multimedia resources to use for
introducing these concepts to students." Another participant added,
"The videos made me rethink what a scientist does."