The Burlington Community School District has been awarded a $42,700 grant from the Iowa Department of Education to aid in the delivery of science curriculum.
The DoE first announced the availability of the OpenSciEd/LLC Materials and Professional Development Grant to Iowa school districts this past December. BCSD was notified of the grant award in February.
The funds will be used to provide support, materials and assistance to BCSD’s middle and high school teachers as the district continues to implement the OpenSciEd curriculum.
“The purpose is to ensure that our teachers and staff are able to have the opportunity to have additional training and development,” BCSD Grants Coordinator Sibyl McIntire said.
Developed over the last decade, OpenSciEd is a relatively new curriculum that BCSD first implemented as a pilot program at the middle school level, with teachers at each level providing feedback to curriculum developers, who in turn used that feedback to adjust material. The curriculum was expanded to the high school level in 2021.
“BCSD has been a test district for OpenSciEd for several years, and has been a leader across the state,” McIntire said. “We are pleased to be able to offer to all our teachers this additional training and support as we move forward with this curriculum. The trainers will be our local (Area Education Agency) partners.”
The grant funding will provide middle and high school teachers, instructional coaches, and district leadership with training locally to prepare for the upcoming academic year. The funds also will be used to purchase materials, including curriculum kits for all the classrooms and replacement materials for the coming school year.
OpenSciEd differs from more traditional science curricula in that it focuses largely on encouraging critical thinking to find the causes behind various phenomena, with teachers acting more as facilitators than directors.
At the middle school level, the curriculum has involved extensive learning on things like weather phenomena and the impacts of palm oil farming on orangutan populations. Examples at the high school level have included a chest plate force reduction project and the effects of urbanization on native species at the genetic level.
