High School Teachers at CERN
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Activities for the HST 1998  Programme.

Programme coordinators:
         M. Diemoz        (INFN), chair of the Summer Student Committee
          J. Salicio-Diez (CERN),
         M.L.Mangano  (CERN, Theretical Physics Division)

Goals of the 1998 pilot programme:

• Gather experience and information before a more formal programme can be established in the future.
• Use the feedback from a small set of specially selected teachers to identify the most important areas of interest for this training experience.

 Ultimate  goals of a High School teachers' programme:

• Improve teaching of modern and particle physics in HS
• Promote a common "european syllabus''
• Encourage the cooperation between CERN and existing programs sponsored by the European Union in the area of  scientific education
• Promote interest in CERN, particle physics and physics in general in schools and related communities.

Contents of this Report:

•  Selection of teachers
•  Overall logistics
•  Programme of lectures, visits and discussions
•  Feed-back received
•  Further developments since the end of the programme
•  Suggestions for future programmes
•  Acknowledgments

   

  Selection of teachers:

Given the short amount of time available, and the obvious constraints,  we selected
 the teachers on the basis of personal contacts, asking for the  basic requirements:

• availability over the full period (3 weeks in July)
• good knowledge of English
• familiarity with PC's

Preference was given to teachers already involved in EU educational programmes.
We finally selected 9 teachers (click on their name to send mail):

JOSE VINCENTE ARECHALDE ACENA (Spain)
ERNESTO LOWY (Spain)
MONICA GALLONI (Italy)
DICK HOEKZEMA (Netherlands)
HEINZ WIRGES (Germany)
DAVID WHITTAKER (UK)
EVANGELIA CHRISTAKI (Greece)
JAN P‰LSG‰RD (Sweden, teaching in Norway)
JAN FINNBY (Norway)

Some of these teachers have interesting curricula: text-book writers, science-museum coordinators, advisors to Education Administrations, representatives of teachers' associations, etc..
 

Overall logistics:

The teachers were accommodated at the Hotel Sofia in St. Genis. We provided them with a large office in the TH Division. M. Storr provided several PC's, on loan from the PE/ED Division.

 

Lecture programme:

The teachers arrived on July 6, and stayed for three weeks.  The first week was devoted to developing tools (e.g. computing and Web tutorials) and getting introduced to the world of HEP. The second week was devoted to building up knowledge. The third week, in addition to the continuation of the lecture programme,  saw the teachers engaged in autonomous work and preparation of material to be used in the classroom.
Through the 3 weeks, the teachers followed the lectures of the Summer Student programme. These included:

• General introduction to CERN and HEP (3hrs, C. Llewellyn Smith)
• Fundamental concepts in HEP (6hrs Kleiss and 4hrs Lillestol)
• HEP detectors (5hrs, Virdee)
• Standard Model (7hrs, Quigg)
• Trigger and data acquisition (4hrs, Mato Villa)
• Computing at CERN (3hrs, Cass)

In addition, special lectures were prepared for them:

• Principles and applications of particle accelerators (2 hrs, T.Wilson)
• Introduction to the WEB,  WEB tutorials (2 afternoons, R.Callieau, M.Storr and M.Draper)
• Cosmology and astroparticle physics (A. De Rujula)
• CERN technologies, partnership with industry (F. Bourgeois)
• Medical applications (U. Amaldi)
• Physics beyond the Standard Model (J. Ellis)
• From atoms to quarks (F. Close)
• Research practice at CERN: a sociologist's perspective (M. Merz)

The teachers were also led to visits of

• the L3 and Delphi experiments and control rooms (M.Diemoz, F.Cavallari and A. Cattai)
• Microcosm (E. Sanders)
• Computer Center (part of Summer Student visits' programme)
• LHC test string (part of summer Student visits' programme)
• Vacuum and cryogenics labs (P. Chiggiato)

Finally, the programme was completed by several discussion sessions, devoted to

• the weekly evaluation of the pilot programme (3 afternoons)
• the  implementation of a HEP curriculum in the High School programmes (2 afternoons+1 morning)

These discussion sessions were attended and led by several people, including M. Storr, T. Wilson, E.  Lillestol, E. Sanders, P. Catapano, S. Hegarty, F. Close, R. Cousins.

A general discussion and evaluation of the programme, which took place during the last afternoon and which was attended by most of the above external advisors, concluded the work.

Evaluation questionnaires were distributed to the teachers, and formed the basis for the overall evaluation of the project, and for the planning of future similar activities.

  Feed-back received

The main reaction of the participants was an unconditional attestation of gratitude for the opportunity offered to them to learn about CERN and HEP, and to experience how advanced
research is done.  The main criticisms were related to the format of the programme (too many lectures, invitation extended too late, not enough information on the programme provided prior to arrival), and are justified by  its ``pilot'' nature. Here is a summary of the main issues on which we requested input, and of the comments received:
 

Balance between time devoted to lectures, to discussions, and to personal work:  in the course of
the programme, it turned out that the teachers could actually do work, and not just absorb
information. During the last week, they started working on a WEB page documenting their
activities, and collecting material useful for future similar experiences. They started collecting
and documenting a list of Web sites containing material usable for their teaching activities.
This includes sites with proposals for simple experiments to be done in class,  sites with
HEP training material for high-school students, etc.
In view of this, the teachers would have liked to have more free time during the last week, to be
able to complete this work. Given that the Summer Student lectures of the 3rd week were not useful anymore to the teachers, it would be advisable in the future to leave the mornings of the last week lecture-free.

Level of the lectures attended:  the teachers enjoyed very much most of the lectures of the
Summer Student programme They allowed them to get in touch with the most recent
developments in the field, and to interact with the young students.  After the second week, though, the level started becoming too high, and most of the information was lost.  The special lectures were a big success. The teachers loved the close interaction with the lecturers that these occasions provided, appreciated the efforts made by the lecturers to provide them with material of potential use for the classroom, and  got several suggestions on how to improve their teaching.

Which impact will this experience have on their teaching?  The answers to this question varied a lot, depending on the structure of the national curricula. Some teachers believed it would be very hard to add new material to their courses, in particular if this material is not part of the official syllabus and will not be part of their final examinations. Other teachers were more optimistic, and promised to start working on the inclusion of the material we offered them in their courses.
 Quoting from one of their transparencies shown during the final meeting: ``It is quite obvious that everything we have experienced here is for us, and that this material will have to be digested and simplified before it is fed to the students. We have received a lot of written material which would help us make more interesting lessons when we go home. And most of all we have received an input which cannot be measured in money. We had the three weeks of our life, when it comes to upgrading our skills, and will go home to the students with sparks in our eyes.''

Duration of the programme: some of the teachers complained that 3 weeks might be too long. Others felt this was the right amount of time to enable them to get to know the place, to know each other, benefit from the lectures and have time to develop some material.
From our viewpoint, the 3 weekswere necessary to expose the teachers to a possibly redundant amount of material, from which to extract feedback on the most useful material to be used in the future.

Number of teachers:  half of the participants indicated that 9-10 is the right number, the other half suggested that the programme might be enlarged to 15-20, possibly divided in subgroups.

Other comments and suggestions from the teachers:

• More time with professional communicators would have been useful
• Have more hands-on activities. It would be nice to prepare some little experiment which can be used in class. The teachers identified several Web sites with suggestions for small experiments (e.g.  Bizarre stuff you can make in your kitchen ) and would have liked some time to play with these.
• Have more discussions on how to simplify this advanced material, and make it accessible to HS students.
• Have more time to work on the projects that were identified as a potential outcome of these three weeks: Web page, preparation of sets of introductory lectures on HEP for HS students, etc.

 

          Further developments since the end of the programme

We expect to continue receiving feed-back from the participants through the Winter. In particular, we are interested in monitoring new activities that they generated as a result of their experience. So far, we have gathered the following information:

• An article on the experience at CERN of the UK teacher and 5 of his students appeared on a local UK newspaper.  Articles are being prepared for newspapers in Greece and Italy. An article for the Norwegian journal of physics teachers is also being written
• A CERN day is being organised by our greek teacher in the Maroussi municipality (Athens suburb). She invited some greek physicists (CERN users) to attend
• Lectures and conferences on this experience have been given in Schools and at teachers' meetings in Norway, Italy, Germany, Greece. More are scheduled for forthcoming regional or national meetings of teachers' associations in Germany and Norway. An interesting thing has been noticed by our german teacher: during his public presentations, the pupils' parents seemed much more interested in CERN and HEP research than his fellow teachers!
• The german teacher started an extra-curriculum course in physics, where he addresses issues which are not in the syllabus. He is  including special relativity, quantum mechanics, and particle physics. Students' response is enthusiastic, although the course is not mandatory, and not all students signed up.
• The italian teacher, who is co-coordinator of some EC-sponsored HS networks, has brought this programme to the attention of the european colleagues she is in contact with.  She is exploring the possibility to obtain financial support from the EC to continue the work started at CERN in collaboration with the other teachers.
• Work on the HST Web page is in progress. The current page, still under development, is accessible at http://www.phys.uu.nl/~hoekzm/ssthome.htm .  It is expected that this will eventually be linked to the CERN outreach pages, and that it will provide useful material for high schools planning visits to CERN within the Visit Service programme.

          

Suggestions for future programmes

Surprisingly enough, there was general consensus among the teachers that the formula adopted this year is by and large adequate. While a good fraction of the teachers suggested that 2 weeks are preferred, most of them indicated that the number of participants should be kept within 10 or 15.
From the point of view of the organisers, it is hard to imagine how to cope with a larger number. Contrary to the summer students, who are followed in their activities by individual supervisors, and who have available office space and computing resources through the group to which they are assigned, the organization of the HST activities fell entirely on our shoulders. We had to work hard to find appropriate office space and to provide the teachers with computing equipment (kindly provided eventually by M.Storr!).  These two elements proved essential for the success of the project: the teachers benefited enormously by having a common room in which to meet and computers on which to work.

It has become clear during this exercise that a main goal of this programme should be the preparation of didactic material, in the form of lists of Web sites with educational material, pre-packaged lectures on HEP, and small experiments to be carried out in the class room. One of the main conclusions of this exercise, therefore, is that the main limitation we see in carrying out this experience in the future is not the financial part, but the overall logistics and infrastructure support. It is plausible to expect that funds from the EC can be collected to support future programmes. Selected high schools in Europe could apply for these funds through the appropriate EC agencies (DG13 supports educational activities involving major research laboratories as gathering points).  CERN should therefore concentrate on providing the adequate infrastructure for programs of this sort to take place.

The organisation and operation of this pilot programme kept us busy full time for about a month. We cannot assume a similar availability for future programmes. One possible solution to this problem is to select one or two teachers from this year's programme, and invite them next year to lead the new group of teachers. One or two teachers from next year would do the same for the following year's programme, etc. This does not solve all logistics problems, but at least reduces in part the amount of work we need to put in. The direct transfer of knowledge and experience between the old and the new participants has also the clear advantage of guaranteeing continuity in the parts of the project where a constant build-up of material is foreseen (for example, the maintenance of a HST Web page).

Identifying projects for which CERN could have an immediate benefit is also important. Once again, having our high school teachers develop and maintain a Web page would be very useful, since this Web page could contain material to be distributed to all high schools planning visits to CERN. These HST's could provide an effective interface between european high schools and CERN, complementing the activities of the Visit Service.  A proper documentation of the HST activities could provide useful suggestions for similar activities to be carried out in high schools in Europe. These activities might take place within the framework of the EC funded HS networks, and the CERN programme, if properly documented and made available through a Web site, could provide a seed for a significant expansion of the HEP culture through high schools, well beyond those directly involved in the HST programme through the selected teachers.

The programme itself will benefit from the presence of more hands-on activities, and of more pedagogical lectures. A possibility would be to add a week of really basic lectures to the standard Summer Student programme. The non-physics summer students (engineers and computer-science students), which represent 25-30% of the summer student body, would also benefit a lot from this. Stronger contacts between the HST's and the students would also be beneficial.