New trends in physics teaching, v.4; The ... - unesdoc - Unesco

Packet production
United States
PEEC differs from the large curriculum development projects of the sixties in several ways.
Compared to the funding available to those efforts, the PEEC funding is ‘peanuts’. It was obvious
to us from the start that we could not mount the full scale theoretical and practical development
of ‘a curriculum’. We rely heavily on teachers as curriculum developers. The following production
model has evolved. The PEEC staff chooses topics for summer packets. The topics are fleshed out
with suggested lessons and are then the major focus of a steering committee meeting which
develops the packet outlines further. We go into the summer writing session knowing more or less
what packets we want to develop. We choose our teachers (from different grade levels and
disciplines) with packet outlines in mind. We split the teachers into three writing groups which
produce one packet each during the first two to two-and-a-half weeks of the writing session.
The teachers then reassemble into two larger groups and produce two more packets.
We do not completely dictate to our teacher-writers. We meet them at the opening session and
discuss the five packet outlines with them, but still allow changes if they are sufficiently convincing.
Many of the packets that are now in print or undergoing review and testing were not the
packets we intended to produce.
Distribution and implementation
We believe that the PEEC materials can be used by teachers on delivery. In fact, of course, many
teachers wil not pick up something new and use it in this way. Recognizing this fact, we have
engaged - to the extent possible with our small staff - in workshop efforts as well.
We have either sponsored or participated in twenty or more teacher workshops per year since
the beginning of the project. In addition, we have put on workshops at the annual and regional
meetings of both NSTA and the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS). We have reached
out to other educational organizations and have taken every opportunity to have our materials or
a workshop leader or both at their conventions.
We have also tried to make it possible for others to present workshops. For this reason, we
have produced the Workshop Handbook which gives guidance to a local workshop leader who
wants to put on a half-day or full-day workshop.
Materials and workshops are a good start toward a project, but more is needed. We have
publicized the existence of the materials and described our philosophy, etc. in journals and newsletters
of both NSTA and NCSS. The need for a newsletter specializing in energy education was
also soon apparent, and with partial funding from DOE, such a newsletter, Energy & Education,
was born in the fall of 1977. Energy & Education is a bi-monthly publication. In its five issues
per year, energy educators can find out what is going on and who is doing what around the
country. Readers are given a calendar of events, a list of free and inexpensive materials, an
editorial from someone with something to say to energy educators, book reviews of important
energy books, and an energy facts page which keeps them up to date on data, etc.
Energy h Education is in many ways our most important product. It is the one thing that
gives a national image to energy education. It’s a way for the science teacher, the social studies
teacher or the education manager of an electric supply company or an oil company to say to himself
‘I belong to that group of people who call themselves energy educators’ and to keep up with
what is happening in the field.
The final step in the expansion of the early PEEC writing efforts into a full fledged project was
to establish our Regional Energy Education Network (REEN). Since PEEC had grown in stature
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