ASC Public School Partnership Advisory Committee News

Inaugural Meeting

January 11, 2007
A small group of public school teahers and Ohio State faculty held the committee's inaugural meeting to discuss how we might explore opportunities for public school teachers and Ohio State fauclty in the five liberal arts colleges to work totether on projects of mutual interest, such as professional developmenet, cooperative research, campus visits, cooperative teaching, etc. The group consisted of middle and high school teachers from seven central Ohio school districts in the subject areas of art, English/language arts, foreign languages, information science, and social studies. (Two teachers in humanities and math were unable to attend.) These teachers were joined by Ohio State faculty and administrators from across the arts and sciences and involved in university-p-12 partnerships.

Our discussion centered on four kinds of opportunities for developing two-way partnerships between public school teachers and their students and Ohio State faculty and students. Below are those four categories as well as some initial possible activities. It is the mission of this committee to develop a fully-integrated set of activities to develop these partnership opportunities.

1) Ohio State faculty visits to public school classrooms.

Goals: Together, teachers work directly with students on activities that are co-designed. Some of these projects might also be extended through use of technology. In the next few years, the Ohio Third Frontier Network (TFN) will allow universities and public schools across the state to connect inexpensively and efficiently through a high-speed fiber-optic network called OARnet, the networking division of the Ohio Super Computer Center.

Possible Activities:

• Discussing college expectations and how to prepare for college
• Visits by fine arts faculty (such as Ann Hamilton) “speaking to their art,” discussing topics such as where their inspiration comes from. These artists might work with students to create a project together.
• Team teaching in which high school students might begin work on a problem or project and then be visited by Ohio State faculty to look at it more closely or work through later stages of the problem.

2) Teaching partnerships to think through classroom practices.

Goals: This work might include revaluation of curriculum or cooperatively developed action research.

Possible Activities:

• Focus on middle schools as crucial years for student learning and development of attitudes about future goals
• Creation of new partnerships through the Partnership Advisory Committee. A possible example is Saturday morning workshops where public school teachers and Ohio State faculty meet periodically to discuss best practices in a particular subject or around a particular topic. Administrators might nominate a district teacher to attend such workshops and bring information back to colleagues.
• Participation in existing programs such as the Foreign Language Center’s Collaborative Articulation and Assessment Project, the ICAM interactive online modules for physical sciences, Department of Physics Modeling Workshops.
• A variation of these partnerships might include Project GRO’s system for matching public school teachers with Ohio State science researchers.

3) Middle and high school student visits to Ohio State’s campus in the context of ongoing relationships.

Goals: These visits should provide students the opportunity to become comfortable with college settings.

Possible Activities:

• Some of the activities developed as part of the P-12 led Johnson Park Middle School/Ohio State Partnership might serve as beginning models for such visits.
• Workshops with the College of Pharmacy on diabetes and careers in pharmacy
  
  
• An exploration of Spanish through technology and culture
  
  
• A hands-on experience in which students re-construct pottery shards to learn how archeologists make meaning from ancient artifacts at the Museum of Classical Archaeology.
  
  
• Activities at other museums on Ohio State’s campus, including the Geology Museum, Biological Sciences Greenhouse, etc.
  

4) Shepherding a process for learning about available resources at Ohio State and in public school districts and sharing it with our colleagues in systematic ways.

Next Steps

We will begin to pilot some of the projects discussed at our first meeting. Currently, Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing and Mindy Wright are working with Mike Morbitzer of Hamilton-Local to pilot a classroom visit to talk about college expectations.

Ohio State Resources

Jacqueline Jones Royster	Executive Dean, Colleges of the Arts and Sciences English	royster.3@osu.edu
Edward Adelson	Associate Executive Dean, Colleges of the Arts and Sciences Music	adelson.3@osu.edu
Christopher Andersen	Project GRO Education	andersen.18@osu.edu
Rebecca Bias	Foreign Language Center	bias.3@osu.edu
Matthew Baumann	Archaeology	baumann.64@osu.edu
Andrew Heckler	Physics	heckler@mps.ohio-state.edu
Nancy Nestor-Baker	P-12 Project Education	nestor-baker.149@osu.edu
Mindy Wright	Colleges of the Arts and Sciences English	wright.7@osu.edu

Teacher Postings

In future issues, advisory committee members can post information or announcements about events or projects at their schools or in their districts that might be of interest to other members. If you have such a posting, please send it to Mindy Wright, at wright.7@osu, and I’ll include it in the next issue.