Science teachers huddle over bacteria colonies at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. The museum plans to train 1,000 area educators to be better science teachers in the next five years. Linda Lutton/WBEZ

We are partial to field trips. Bravo to these educators for recognizing their value and putting their own two feet forward first (thanks to NPR, USA, for the podcast and published story):

In a classroom across from the coal mine exhibit at the Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, students are huddled around tables, studying petri dishes of bacteria.

But these aren’t school-age kids — these students are all teachers, responsible for imparting science to upper-elementary or middle-school students.

That’s a job that many here — and many teachers in grammar schools around the country — feel unprepared for.

“That’s why I’m here,” says fifth-grade teacher Joel Spears. “I teach all the subjects. I went in not knowing how to teach science, really. I didn’t have the materials or the know-how to even teach it properly.”

Once a month, Spears and dozens of other teachers come to the museum for a day of lessons and materials to then take back to their classrooms across the Chicago metro region.

Teacher Jonathan Fisher, a philosophy major who avoided life science in college but now teaches it to fourth-graders, taught genetics to his class with an activity he learned here.

“The students used Styrofoam blocks and different body parts — so limbs and dowel rods and different-sized eyes — [and flipped] coins to figure out which genes would be passed on to their kids,” he explains. “The classroom couldn’t have been more excited.”

Sparking Kids’ Interest At The Right Time

Today, the teachers here at the museum will be given diagrams of cells, petri dishes, bottles of Glo Germ (a lotion that exposes bacteria on hands), and even instructions for a simple incubator that enables students to grow bacteria from their own dirty hands.

“One of the challenges in the U.S. in getting kids engaged in science is that we don’t have enough really high-quality science teachers in the middle grades,” says Andrea Ingram, who oversees education at the Museum of Science and Industry. “And that’s kind of like the early childhood of science. We either capture kids’ enthusiasm there, get them committed to science, or we don’t.”

Ingram says museums are important partners in improving science instruction, especially given tight school budgets. Museums are popular with business and civic leaders, for one, and where else can you find tornadoes, lightning and real cow eyeballs to dissect?

But the real test of this teacher training program is in schools like Sawyer Elementary on Chicago’s Southwest Side…

Read and/or listen to the whole story here.