Partnership for Student Success in Science

Partnership for Student Success in Science (PS³) is pleased to announce that is has received $6,766,846 from the National Science Foundation for a five-year, regional teacher professional development project in science. It was one of only three similar science projects in the nation that were funded by the NSF this year. The project is designed to serve nine school districts in partnership with San Jose State University, Agilent Technologies and Synopsys. This year is a planning year with all project partners collaborating to prepare for the upcoming project activities. The goal is to develop high quality science instruction for teachers in the region with support for classroom implementation. This regional support network will leverage its resources for the benefit of all students.

The PS³ vision has four components:

• building a sustainable long term teacher development model for science in the region that leads to an increase in the pool of well-prepared K-8 science teachers;
  
  
• developing regional leadership capacity that provides and sustains high quality science teaching and learning;
  
  
• ensuring that all children have an outstanding science program that prepares them for complex decision making, technological careers and productive citizenry; and
  
  
• establishing science as the vehicle for underrepresented minorities and English Language Learners (ELL) to become successful students.

To meet these goals the project involves over a dozen San Jose State University engineering and education faculty, 26,000 K-8 students and 1,395 pre-service and in-service teachers. Taking a career-long view of professional development, PS³ provides a continuum of learning opportunities for teachers and administrators beginning with pre-service training and new teacher induction as well as providing offerings for in-service teachers, leadership development and a masters degree program

PS³ grew out of the Bay Area Schools for Excellence in Education (BASEE) a project which supported elementary science for seven of the nine school districts over the past six years: Cupertino, Los Altos, Menlo Park, Mountain View-Whisman, Palo Alto, Redwood City and Santa Clara. With two new districts joining the collaborative – Newark Unified and San Mateo-Foster City – the project now works with middle schools in all nine districts plus elementary grades for the new districts.