About BOEP

The Bioregional Outdoor Education Project (BOEP), initiated by the Four Corners School of Outdoor Education in Monticello, Utah in 1998, promotes understanding and appreciation of the Colorado Plateau Bioregion through core-based, interdisciplinary, experiential curricula in grades K-8. It is designed to reach teachers and students on the Colorado Plateau through a Roving Teacher Education and Mentoring delivery system. Our goal is to reach ALL elementary schools in the 96 school districts of the Colorado Plateau bioregion (parts of UT, CO, NM, AZ) over 25 years.

What is BOEP?

BOEP teaches K-8 teachers how to teach the core curriculum in a hands-on place-based way through a two-year series of workshops, inservices, and mentoring. In addition, BOEP provides Science Resource Centers for each school. BOEP works with 20 schools each two-year cycle.

Highlights of the Project in Each School

For the 2007-2009 school years we are focusing on creating learning progressions. Learning progressions are defined as logical sequences of student performances (knowledge and practices) that become successively more complex across grade bands. The development of learning progressions is an emerging area of study prompted by concern that exiting science standards and curricula do not result in meaningful learning for students. The main criticism of existing science standards and/or curricula is that they do not identify the essential ideas (Big Ideas) that are at the core of a given topic nor do they build understanding of these key ideas from year to year as students become increasingly able to develop more in-depth understandings. The Big Ideas we will focus on are diversity of life, interdependence of life, and flow of matter and energy.

Children often come into the science classroom with intuitive understandings that must be taken into consideration in planning instruction and a great deal of research has been conducted on students’ naive conceptions. It is generally accepted that all students’ prior knowledge, ideas, skills and attitudes form the foundation of new learning and failure to take student’s preconceptions into consideration in planning and delivering instruction will often results in unsuccessful learning outcomes.

As teachers understanding of key central concepts within the Big Ideas increase, they will acquire deeper science content knowledge, and learn to implement successively more sophisticated ways of reasoning, ultimately resulting in increased ability to provide improved learning experiences for students. Teachers learn and apply pedagogical knowledge of how students’ prior learning experiences provide a framework for future learning and improve when situated in a real-world place-based context.

Goals and Objectives

Goal 1:Create, pilot, revise, field test, and evaluate 3 place-based and inquiry-based Learning Progression modules across 3 grade bands, based on 3 big ideas in The Living Environment---diversity of life, interdependence of life, and energy flow in ecosystems--via

• Working with 40 rural schools, (10 K-8 schools/state), in 4 states, over 4 years (160 teachers/4,000 students), 50% Navajo.
• Developing LP modules that are correlated to each of four state’s core curriculums (UT, NM, AZ, CO).
• Creating Learning progressions that include a) a model of the target of practice appropriate for learners b) the starting points of learners intuitive understandings and practices c) a sequence of successively more sophisticated understandings and practices and d) instructional supports to help learners develop the practice.

Goal 2: Train teachers to use LP’s via a two-year, in-person, professional development model for two cadres of 20 schools/80 teachers (40 schools/160 teachers total), that includes:

• 3 intensive institutes/year, 2 in-services/school/year, and 4 workshops/year
• A Regional Coordinator in each school 2x per month for 9 months
• A Resource Center in each school;
• Personal(ized) Professional Development Plan for all 160 teachers related to place-based teaching of 3 learning progressions;
• An annual project conference, three newsletters/year, refreshed website;
• A Navajo cultural consultant;
• A professional Advisory Council.

Goal 3: Create and disseminate a teacher workbook for Learning Progressions in 3 content areas of The Living Environment that includes:

• An understanding of possible alternative frameworks students have for the 3 LP’s, conflicts these have with accepted scientific knowledge of the 3 LP’s, and in the process learn that teachers have limited understandings of their own;
• Content that will help teachers’ understand problems with student reasoning, plus activities at intensive institutes, workshops, mentoring, and a personal (ized) professional development plan to improve teachers skills/knowledge to improve student learning;
• Tasks that will get at student pre-conceptions;
• How to share results and collaborate on modifying tasks; and
• Teacher support to achieve improved learning performances.