Urban Advantage

I was asked last week to help “facilitate” some of the professional development sessions for Urban Advantage (UA). This is a collaboration between the New York City Department of Education and the New York City Science institutions – The Bronx Zoo, American Museum of Natural History, Hall of Science, Botanical Gardens, etc. You might think such an effort involving over a million dollars in funding from the city council might have some online information, but at the moment such information is lacking so I can’t link to any sites.

I am working for three Saturdays with the Bronx Zoo sessions. A team of about 10 or so science teachers from different school regions is hosted by the zoo, instructed by a zoo scientist, Jennell Ives. She is very knowledgeable and competent, which is as one might assume for an undertaking such as this. As science facilitator in district 6 a couple of years ago, I was always impressed with the scientists we worked with at the Museum of Natural History who offered their expertise to help teachers. This is my first exposure to a scientist working at the zoo and I can only hope that all the other institutions have such a great instructor.

The main focus of the initiative is helping teachers utilize the science institutions to help students in grade 8 complete their “exit projects.” My regents students are also expected to complete an exit project in addition to all the other demands, which have been alluded to in earlier posts. The term “exit project” is an unfortunate one, because it is really part of a larger requirement that students complete a long-term scientific investigation every year, pretty much from kindergarten through high school. The “exit” part was added a few years ago really as an escape hatch for students with failing grades in science who might nonetheless be allowed to “exit” anyway with an acceptable project completed. It’s a bit convoluted, since no one is ever kept back based solely on science grades anyway, so why the need for an escape mechanism is entirely unclear to me. Perhaps because of this, the real intent of the projects was never really articulated to anyone’s satisfaction and repeated requests by science coordinators to get the Board of Ed to clarify what exactly it wanted from these “exit projects” were never answered.

Nonetheless, we are all pretty much unanimous in our agreement that long term investigations – such as controlled experiments, field studies, secondary research, and design projects – are a worthwhile and important part of science education. So we promoted and pushed the concept at the district for a long time. Back in the day (before the Bloomberg/Klein regime) our district (6, in collaboration with 5 & 3) pretty much dropped the “exit project” name and instituted project requirements for grades 5-8, incorporated into our curriculum frameworks along with content objectives derived from the NY State Core Curriculum.. Unfortunately, now that this city-wide endeavor has begun with much fanfare, the term exit project was picked up again and we seem to be stuck with it unless the UA initiative is expanded next year, when the parties involved will have to grapple with what to call the projects once they start getting 5th, 6th, and 7th graders involved.

I was impressed with the the participants, the instructor as noted above, and of course the zoo is a great place to visit. I managed to snap a nice picture of the Inca tern, Larosterna inca, in a very large open air (outdoor) aviary.