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Stem Cell Biology Curricula in High Schools

Gregory Simpson, Ph.D.

November 13th @ 3:56pm

I recently attended a I day Stem Cell Biology workshop for High School teacher's. The event held on Tuesday November 11th 2008 was sponsored by the Broad Institute, the Whitehead Institute, the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and the Biotechnology Institute.

The event was fantastic, presenting a broad range of issues including;
1. How to include Stem cell biology in the high school teaching curricula,
2. The cutting edge research being conducted now and the rapidly evolving clinical applications and
3. The ethical and legal ramifications of the science now and in the future.

It was clear that participant's, although excited about the field and willing to introduce the concepts to their students, were mindful of the glaring obstacles to this being readily achievable in the near term.

First and foremost on the teacher’s minds seemed to be what strategy would be needed to teach the concepts within the scope of the MCAS framework. The second appeared to be ensuring that the teacher's were able to gain access to the type of knowledge needed to teach the subject in an age appropriate way. And third, the identification of suitable experiments and access to relevant literature that could excite and provide unique learning opportunities for both students and teachers.

We were given tours of both the Broad and the Whitehead and were provided with a unique opportunity to see some of the automated technologies driving biological research. What also crossed my mind was the critical need for CRITICAL THINKERS at these levels. The high through technologies now used in research, both in industry and academia, are driving the need for creative thinkers and the point was continuously stressed that the middle and High school level is were this process starts!

I'm looking forward to further engagements and activities with these groups of teachers, researchers and communications experts over the up coming months.

candace dunlap

March 12th @ 8:05am

I did not attend the Broad Institute workshop, however having taught high school biology for many years, I learned through writing my own curricula that it is very possible to align curricula to MCAS biology standards by using a case study or PBL (such as a stem cell case study) as a lens to learn specific standards.



Also - 21st century skills for science include both applied science (i.e. what scientists would do) and consumer science (i.e. how might a non-science person need to make sense of current stem cell research). Either curricula approach would be fine; however I think we often assume that if we use the applied approach, students often gain skills as consumers of the science. I have found that assumption to be mostly invalid and think that we need to spend more time on the consumer approach - primarily because most of students in a biology class will not go on to be scientists whereas most of them will need to be critical consumers of science at some point during thier lifetime.