ASTRO-1 Team

We, the finely-tuned ASTRO-1 Team, are brimming with uncontrollable enthusiasm as we hammer out the details our new "space alien" theme for the year. This is one of many "hooks" we will use to grab our tough, at-risk audience in a program intended to help motivate and influence students to move successfully into the future with a push they won't forget... one that could possibly change their lives. This is all part of a master plan that uses science to "hook" students' interest in learning and caring about their future. This science course is designed to take the ever present "gang mentality" and channel that energy into goal-oriented group interactions that produce success for all students.

We'll use a lot of humor, wild stories, and memory hooks in direct instruction using laser disk back-up for the auditory and visual learners, numerous labs and manipulatives to catch the kinesthetic learners, and performance based testing to assure mastery. Utilizing this theme, our intergalactic travelers will have to apply the scientific method and all of the process skills that we will teach them throughout the year to each of the many facets of planet exploration. They will even have to test drive miniature earth vehicles to learn about mass measurement, charting and graphing, and acceleration. This will be one of dozens of process skills-development labs striving to inspire interest in learning and applying knowledge.

The three of us will team teach many of the activities, pulling our crews together in our world class space center media room, which we specifically designed, funded, and built for just this purpose. We'll train our groups, switch them back and forth so everyone benefits from our strengths, and culminate our adventure with our hydroponics and data research project which is the vehicle we use for applying concepts learned in chemistry, light spectrum in photosynthesis, and plant management. By this time, these new residents will have "worked" for the many earth businesses we have created, learning management skills and interpersonal strategies. Finally, they will have to operate their own companies, interviewing team members and developing an infrastructure to complete their final reports of findings for their hydroponic projects.

This at-risk program redefines the child's entire concept of "school " and empowers them to set goals, control their environment and accept responsibility for their future. The teacher becomes the employer, the other students are coworkers, and failure to achieve is unemployment. Grades become a reflection of income. Self esteem blossoms in this environment as students work and apply their new found skills in real scientific research.

-- Brenda Goldstein, Andrew Lucia and Vonneke Miller