This year's National Engineers Week in February marked the fourth anniversary of an IEEE outreach effort designed to boost the quality of technical education in precollege classrooms. Launched in 2001 by IEEE Educational Activities, the Teacher In-Service Program offers educators lessons on a variety of technical subjects, such as motors, switches, circuits, and simple machines.

Teachers from Hillsborough County schools near Tampa, Fla., assemble a spectroscope kit.

As the name of the program suggests, the subjects are taught during so-called “in-service” days that are regularly set aside for teachers to take part in continuing education activities. In the last four years, IEEE volunteers, many of whom learned the subjects as undergraduates, made 29 presentations to 568 precollege teachers in nine U.S. states and South Africa, according to Douglas Gorham, the IEEE’s director of educational outreach.

Members participating in the program come from 14 IEEE sections. Most active in the effort are members from the Florida West Coast Section (FWCS), where a pilot program was launched in February 2001. IEEE volunteers there have made presentations to classroom-size groups of about 30 elementary, middle, and high school teachers, says IEEE Member Ralph Painter. He has been involved in the program since its inception.

According to Painter, the presentations cover a minimum of technical theory. Instead, the emphasis is on a hands-on activity related to a technical subject. The subjects are aligned with state education standards and the requirements of local school districts. Painter has gotten subjects from textbooks, teacher feedback, and high-school physics laboratories. Members looking for topics can also turn to the IEEE Educational Activities Web site, where they can find 15 lesson plans based on past in-service presentations. The plans cover topics such as circuit design, equilibrium concepts, and robotics and they are available in English and Spanish. The lessons also include  teaching summaries and project worksheets for students.

The IEEE volunteers provide the materials and then help the teachers as they work their way through an activity. “By walking them through a project, we get the teachers to the point where they feel comfortable enough to present it on their own,” Painter explains. The idea is for the teachers to return to their schools and lead the same activity in their classrooms.

Although a single volunteer can preside over a session, Painter recommends three or four. With several volunteers on hand, one can present the information while the others walk around the room helping teachers who are having difficulty.

For the best results, Painter advises volunteers to develop hands-on activities based on topics they deal with on the job. “When you take something you’re working on and bring it down to a high school level, I think it comes across much better because you’re speaking from firsthand experience,” he says. Dealing with a familiar topic also helps presenters overcome their own shyness in front of an audience, he adds.

COLLABORATIONS  Teachers leave in-service sessions with more than just a little technical knowledge. “They always get something to take with them—a lesson plan or some other printed material,” notes Doug Wagner, who has attended many in-service sessions for teachers in Florida’s Manatee County school district. “The main thing that attracts teachers to workshops is knowing they’re going to leave with something they can give their kids,” says Wagner, the director of adult, career, and technical education in his district.

Ideally, teachers will also leave with a greater understanding of engineers and their careers, Painter says. This understanding is often gained when teachers and engineers chat during breaks and other “downtime” periods during the sessions. By passing on information about their occupations, Painter and his colleagues fulfill another objective of the Teacher In-Service Program: to increase the likelihood that teachers will introduce their students to the engineering profession.

With a focus on local school districts, the program tries to encourage long-lasting collaborations among local engineers and educators. This type of collaborative relationship has developed in the FWCS, according to Wagner. “If we want training on a particular topic, we’ll tell [IEEE volunteers] about it, and they’ll try to set up a training session for us,” he says.

In other cases, the IEEE decides on the subject of a session, which draws teachers interested in that topic. For example, Wagner says, the IEEE section in his area once arranged for teachers to tour a local power plant. After the tour, engineers gave a talk on electric power, and they distributed instructional materials.

Then, back in the classroom, teachers who were on the tour passed their knowledge on to their students, and even assigned them the task of determining how much power was used in their homes during a certain period of time. Data was recorded on worksheets that had to be signed by parents, who themselves learned lessons about power consumption and its cost. “The students loved it because they were teaching their parents something,” Wagner reports.

In Hillsborough County, Fla., Painter worked with Nancy Johnson Marsh, the school district’s supervisor of secondary science, to schedule workshops for local science teachers. In a workshop Marsh cites as particularly effective, IEEE volunteers showed teachers how to make a spectroscope, an optical instrument used for studying the characteristic wavelengths given off by different molecules, and distributed materials that students could use to make the device themselves.

“Not only did they give teachers the plan of what to do, but also the means to do it with,” Marsh says.

IEEE workshops would be even more effective if teachers knew more about how the concepts they teach are applied in the real world, according to Marsh. She also would like to see workshop topics such as the spectroscope tied to actual technical careers when the activity is presented to students.

A long way from Florida, Nico Beute and an IEEE colleague have held sessions with about 100 precollege teachers in the IEEE South Africa Section. They travel to schools on a bus outfitted with interactive technical exhibits dealing with subjects such as energy-efficient lighting. The IEEE volunteers also leave behind instructional materials and descriptions of experiments that teachers can use in their classrooms, says Beute, dean of the engineering faculty at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town.

POSITIVE FEEDBACK  Most teachers who have attended an in-service session found the experience worthwhile, accoring to responses to a program questionnaire. More than 95 percent of respondents said the program added to their technical knowledge, and more than 90 percent said they plan to use information from the program in their classroom instruction.

Those results are consistent with the feedback Painter has received over the years. After a session, teachers are usually enthusiastic, he says. “Generally,” he reports, “they say they’ll use the material in the classroom right away. And they usually ask for more sessions."

FOR MORE INFORMATION about the Teacher In-Service Program, visit http://www.ieee.org/education/precollege/tispt