The Workshop: Nuts and Bolts
The Workshop: Nuts and Bolts
Once you have decided on a topic and chosen an audience planning for the actual workshop can begin. A successful workshop attempts to thoroughly cover its subject without overwhelming people with information. It should be engaging yet challenging for people with a variety of backgrounds. Some things to keep in mind while planning include:
Length
Curriculum
Fees/Tuition
Incentives
Length of Workshop
The length of your workshop should be determined by what you are trying to accomplish and the difficulty of the subject matter. Our molecular biology workshop is one-week long. It combines college level lectures by professional molecular biologists combined with lab experiments that teach participants commonly used molecular research techniques. However these instructors have also taught one-day long workshops to demonstrate some simple molecular techniques for middle school or introductory high school biology courses. Teachers learn to isolate onion DNA, a simple and inexpensive technique and also learn some paper activities for demonstrating DNA structure and replication.
Curriculum
The workshop curriculum should give teachers adequate background knowledge in a subject combined with the most current information available. The format can vary widely depending on the subject, your audience, the facilities and time constraints. The SEPS week-long workshops are patterned after college courses with background lectures, hands-on experimentation with state of the art techniques and guest speakers who are using these techniques in their research programs or businesses. The one-day format is more suitable for field trips or outdoor activities.
Fees and Tuition
SEPS is committed to offering training workshops at no cost to teachers. Our mission is to establish partnerships with community organizations who share our interest in improving science education for all students. We offer high quality workshops in a variety of science areas and targeting audiences from grades K through 12. Our week-long workshops have the option of graduate or professional development credit from Oregon State University. If teachers wish to receive credit for attending they are expected to pay for tuition. All resource materials, textbooks and supplies are provided by SEPS.
Incentives
Most workshops are offered during the summer so teachers are attending on their own time. Incentives can be a way of fostering interest and making the time spent commuting, attending and studying worth the effort. College credit options and free textbooks and resource manuals are attractive extras for any workshop. When funding is available stipends paid directly to participants can help offset the cost of transportation, child care, meals and lodging if necessary.