Two Iowa State faculty members are helping to improve education in Iowa by teaching a course for teachers.

Charlie Drewes and George Brown, both professors in the Department of Zoology and Genetics at ISU, have been teaching a unique two-week biology course at the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory. The purpose of the course, according to Drewes, is to give high school biology teachers the creativity and knowledge to teach worthwhile science with limited resources.

The course is called Techniques for Biology Teaching and is funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Education Initiative at ISU. Interested high school teachers who are accepted into the course are paid a stipend and given tuition, room and board at the Iowa Lakeside Lab this summer.

At first the course may seem like teaching fish how to swim, but Drewes said the course teaches high school teachers “some techniques and experiments that they might not have ever seen or had any experience with.”

Drewes and Brown show the teachers how to obtain simple equipment and how to keep living organisms alive for long periods of time.

“Since they don’t have a lot of time for preparation, they need quick successful kinds of things, things they can pull off the shelf and make work,” Drewes said.

The high school teachers spend a great deal of the time taking field trips to collect organisms from natural areas in and around the Iowa Great Lakes region, where the Lakeside Lab is located.

At the lab, organisms are used for simple experiments about animal locomotion, feeding and physiology. Since the organisms are collected from the field, they do not cost anything but a little leg work. This is important for high school teachers who are often on very low budgets.

“What we are doing is finding, not fancy places, just common everyday ponds, edges of lakes, things that I think a lot of us teachers have access to everywhere in Iowa, or Nebraska, or whatever state,” said Stacey Strempke, a high school biology teacher at Don Bosco High School in Gilbertville, Iowa, who took the course this year. “But going about how to get them, how to preserve them, all those little tips that it just seems like we’re supposed to just know, but you don’t. There is no textbook for this.”

Drewes and Brown make accessible to the teachers a number of organisms and apparatus that can be bought commercially and used for a variety of different experiments.

“Not everybody has time to culture things all year,” Brown said. “So there are some things you can order from [biological supply houses] year round.”

Drewes said he gets a lot of feedback from the high school teachers and modifies parts of the course to better meet the classroom needs of the teachers.

Brown said the best thing about the course is the field trips.

“Other than that, I just like to watch people get excited and do some things,” he said.