Science Teachers
jhalper | March 7, 2016Is this science writer jazzed that ninth-grade girls from a religious girls’ school in Jerusalem won a space/science contest? You bet your sweet solar-powered spacelab she is! It is not just that these girls beat out a lot of other classes (over 400), or that they break more than one stereotype. They also came up with a pretty clever idea for studying the Sun: Send a spacecraft to scatter assorted nanolabs all over an asteroid that is about to pass close to the Earth on its way to the Sun. The contest is held every year in memory of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, who went down with the crew of…
jhalper | January 26, 2015 Prof. Nir Orion
Science Teaching researcher Prof. Nir Orion recently returned from Peru, where his award-winning Blue Planet teaching unit was adopted by the Peruvian Ministry of Education
Q: You have been working for many years to get schoolchildren out of the classroom setting. Why?
A: Schools in general and science teaching in particular are supposed to teach children about the world they live in. But they do it in a sterile environment that is disengaged from the real world; and thus many students do not find relevance or personal meaning in the subjects they “learn.”
There are, of…
jhalper | February 3, 2014“Billions of dollars are being spent on weapons of mass destruction. A small fraction of that could go so far to engage more Israeli and Arab scientists in collaborative projects in order to create a critical mass that will bring about peace.” The speaker is Dr. Zafra Lerman, President of the Malta Conferences Foundation, which organizes conferences in nonaligned Malta for Israeli, Palestinian and Middle Eastern scientists. These bi-annual conferences, attended by researchers from Egypt to Saudi Arabia, focus such neutral topics as materials science, as well as common interests like water and…
jhalper | June 4, 2013The world – or at least a large swathe of Israel – was their classroom. An unusual international conference for science teaching experts started out at the Clore Garden of Science, on the Weizmann Institute campus. From there the “nomadic” conference made its way down to Eilat at the southern tip of the country, Jerusalem in the east and points in between.
Outdoor Learning Environment conference at the Ramon crater
Participating in the first international Outdoor Learning Environment conference were science education researchers from the US, UK, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Portugal,…
jhalper | November 1, 2011In this country, as in much of the Western world, we are constantly bemoaning slipping scores in math and science. So here's a bit of good news: The first 26 science teachers to participate in the Rothschild-Weizmann Program for Excellence in Science Teaching will be receiving their degrees in science education in a few weeks. This M.Sc. program is directed by the Feinberg Graduate School at the Weizmann Institute of Science.*
The idea of the program is simple: To improve science education, invest in the teachers. The Weizmann Institute invited high-school science and math teachers who…