Building Expertise in Science Teaching (BEST)

On May 13th a  Review day for the BEST project was held in St Patrick’s College.

The yearlong BEST project was co-ordinated by Dr Cliona Murphy (CASTeL, SPD) and Dr Janet Varley (CASTeL, SPD) and received funding of €40,000 from NAIRTL and CASTeL (SPD).  The BEST project provided 12 student and 12 practising teachers with opportunities to develop their conceptual and pedagogical knowledge of the Nature of Science (NoS) through an innovative and contemporary interactive science education programme. As part of the project, the student teachers and experienced practitioners taught alongside each other using a co-teaching model to promote NoS ideas in the primary classroom.

On the review day the 12 practising and 12 student teachers who participated in the project gave joint oral and poster presentations on their co-teaching experiences of teaching about Nature of Science in classrooms. Over 40 people attended this highly informative and interesting review day.  This was a pilot project and the co-ordinators are hoping to run the project again with a new cohort of student and practising teachers in the 2010 / 2011 academic year. 

 

Last Updated: Wednesday June 23 2010