NeuroLab Professional Development Summer Institute

https://neurolabsepa.org/pdf/Teacher_Recruitment_Flyer_2022.pdf

Teacher registration is open for NeuroLab, a professional development and classroom learning experience rooted in 30 years of clinical and basic neuroscience research

Program Snapshot: NeuroLab is a multi-lesson, storyline-based instructional unit that links student questions about a rare and unusual movement disorder (the anchoring phenomenon) to interconnected science concepts, ideas, and data that span a diversity of life science disciplines. During this immersive nine-day summer institute, our scientists and partners will present resources and strategies that were designed to help students build - in stepwise fashion - an explanatory model of the movement disorder as they pursue their questions in a collaborative classroom learning community. To develop their models, your students will explore converging lines of behavioral, electrophysiological, neuroanatomical, molecular genetic, cellular, developmental, and neuroimaging data obtained from human subjects and model organisms over the last several decades. The discoveries made by students through the analysis and interpretation of data - which includes big data presented in authoritative databases used by biomedical scientists and physicians - are gradually assimilated into working models that form a major focus of classroom discourse. These models undergo periodic revision and gradually increase in complexity and explanatory power as students progress through the NeuroLab sense-making pathway.

Summer institutes are designed for participants to experience NeuroLab from the perspective of both teachers and students. Our goal is to prepare educators to confidently guide their students through a multi-lesson model-building mission that highlights the interdisciplinary nature of science, the interplay between clinical and basic neuroscience research, and the importance of big data in modern scientific inquiry. An extensive suite of curriculum support materials will be provided to teachers during each institute, which will be led by biomedical scientists at our harbor-based biosciences lab in Ventura Harbor, CA. A stipend is available for educators who implement the NeuroLab experience as an embedded component of a high school life science course in the 2022-2023 school year.