This Spring, I applied to the Science Education Partnership program at Fred Hutch. This year, SEP is celebrating it's 25th Anniversary. It has helped foster partnerships between research scientists and over 300 secondary school science teachers in Washington State through workshops and a science mentor program. Through this year long engagement, teachers learn molecular biology techniques, share their best practices and participate in laboratory research. In addition, participating in SEP allows mentor scientists to hone their teaching skills that can be translated by teachers in the classroom. The goals of the program are include: developing active partnerships that link teachers, scientists, and life science research institutions; co-creating rich classroom learning experiences, facilitating access to essential tools and materials for active learning, providing teachers with professional development in science content, professional practice, and leadership. This unique collaboration provides a platform for frontier research scientists to convey the excitement, challenge and application of their work with teachers, students, and the public.
Each spring, mentor scientists located at our seven partner sites, select teachers to participate in the Science Education Partnership. Teachers and mentor scientists collaborate to design a research experience that is tailored to the individual interests of each teacher. This arrangement often leads to lasting partnerships that extend beyond the summer session to include classroom visits by scientists during the school year. Perhaps more importantly, these partnerships have helped to dispel some of the common stereotypes that each group perceives about the other. The diversity of research projects over the past several years has been enormous and has included such topics as protein structure, DNA sequencing, yeast genetics, fruit fly development, and oncogenes."
– SEP at Fred Hutch Cancer Research Institute