Summer Research Program for Teachers/CERTS

Stanford’s Summer Research Program for Teachers (SRPT) offers eight-week research fellowships for teachers of middle school and high school who teach in the San Francisco Bay Area. Teachers work in a Stanford lab four days a week, and meet once a week as a group for science and engineering lectures by Stanford faculty, lab tours, and seminars on teaching. Participants earn a stipend of $9,000 for the summer and into the school year.

Beginning in summer 2013, a subset of these teachers was funded by the National Science Foundation in a complementary program called Computing and Engineering Research Experiences for Teachers (CERTS). The expectations and activities for CERTS and SRPT are identical.

Space Weather Monitor Program

The Space Weather Monitor program is an education project to build and distribute inexpensive ionospheric monitors to students around the world. The monitors detect solar flares and other ionospheric disturbances.

Geoscape Bay Area for Earth Sciences Teachers

You are invited to a workshop for Earth science teachers about Earth sciences in the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn about current scientific research and understanding of the local geoscape.  This workshop is to enhance your skills, confidence, and knowledge of Earth sciences and invigorate classroom instruction, aligned with California State content standards. You will be taught to use to the Quake-catcher Network which turns your classroom computer into a seismometer.

Stanford Summer Teaching Institute

The Stanford Summer Teaching Institute is a collection of short courses focused on the development of effective instructional practices for a variety of content areas and grade levels.  Dates and topics vary but many courses are focused on STEM.

 

Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE)

For the first time in its history, Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes free of charge to students and educators around the world. Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) expands the Stanford experience to students and educators online. A computer and an Internet connection are all you need. View lecture videos, access reading lists and other course handouts, take quizzes and tests, and communicate with other SEE students, all at your convenience. Visit the program website to access the classes.

Field Trips to a Haptics and Robotics in Medicine Lab

The Collaborative Haptics and Robotics in Medicine (CHARM) Lab offers field trips and demos/presentations in local K-12 classrooms and on campus. The CHARM Lab creates robots and human-computer interfaces that use haptics in order to improve human health, safety, and quality of life. The word haptics refers to the sense of touch. Applications of our research include:

• Robot-assisted surgery
• Simulation and training
• Rehabilitation
• Prosthetics

Visit Stanford Anatomy With Your High School Class

Stanford's Clinical Anatomy invites high school students to visit their labs and facilities. Through customizable programs, instructors help students discover, learn, and apply human anatomy in a professional context by introducing students to many of the same learning resources used by Stanford medical students.  

Public Lectures and Events

Stanford offers many free lectures for the general public on science and engineering topics that are delivered by Stanford's top researchers in terms understandable to the lay public. Examples include the SLAC Lecture Series and the Summer Science Lecture Series. See the "Lectures & Public Events" page on this site for more information.

KIPAC/VIZ Lab Tours

The Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, or KIPAC, is an independent laboratory of Stanford University based at SLAC in Menlo Park. It serves as a bridge between the disciplines of astrophysics, cosmology and particle physics. One of KIPAC's missions is to reach out to local communities and provide resources and tools for K-12 teachers, students and the general public. KIPAC offers: • Tours for your students • Speakers for your classroom • A viewing of one of their presentations in the Visualization Lab (Viz Lab), including a 3-D movie that traces the development of the universe, from the birth of the first star to the formation of the galaxies.

Project Motivation

Project Motivation, affectionately known as ProMo, is a student group dedicated to promoting higher education to minority youths through on-campus visits and tours. Project Motivation is determined to instill a positive attitude towards higher education and help K-12 students understand the unlimited opportunities open to them. Formed in the mid-70's, Project Motivation seeks to encourage under represented high school students to pursue higher education. It is a program that facilitates the interaction between high school students and Stanford undergraduates. Teachers, help your students tour part of campus, see a dorm room, hear college stories from undergraduates and get the scoop about college life.

How To Learn Math

This free online course offers important new research ideas on learning, the brain, and math that can transform students’ experiences with math. The course is primarily for teachers and parents and others who may help students with math. It consists of short videos interspersed with various thinking tasks—such as reflecting on videos, designing lessons, discussing ideas with peers in the class—to promote active engagement. The class features videos with leaders in education such as Carol Dweck, author of mindset theories, and Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Udacity.

Ecology & Sustainability: Experiences with Mexico’s Biocultural Diversity

During this 10-day summer course, teachers will go into the field in Mexico with the Center for Latin American Studies. Participants will work with scientists on research projects focusing on ecology, sustainability, and conservation science at Los Tuxtlas Tropical Biology Station in Veracruz, Mexico. Teachers will have the opportunity to work with science educators from Stanford’s Graduate School of Education's Center to Support Excellence in Teaching (CSET) to develop unit plans, lessons, or units for use in their classrooms.

Science Teaching Through Art (STAR)

The Science Teaching through Art (STAR) program encourages the intersection of art and science by teaching Stanford researchers of all levels to use art and visual aids in communicating their work to a general audience. STAR participants then visit local high schools for a poster presentation.

 

 

Reading to Learn in Science

This free online course is designed to provide knowledge and strategies to help teachers help students comprehend the language of science texts. Instructors will examine the selection of useful science texts; see specific strategies for supporting student comprehension before, during, and after reading; learn how to recognize the unique challenges posed by science texts and how to help students overcome them; and acquire the skills to foster productive discussion around scientific ideas and texts.

Inspiring Future Scientists: K-12 Science Classroom Visits

This program arranges classroom visits by Chemistry graduate students to local high school and K-5 classrooms. The K-5 program offers hands-on demonstrations to build excitement and enthusiasm for science among students. Stanford undergraduate and graduate researchers give hour-long science lessons showcasing various scientific principles. The demonstrations will be hands-on, and the students will be actively engaged with questions posed throughout the lesson.

A similar program is also available for high school classrooms. Graduate students provide novel hands-on guided inquiry lab experiences in which students work together in small groups to carry out an exciting activity that would otherwise not be possible with the minimal equipment and supplies available to most high schools. During each visit, groups of approximately six graduate students from the Stanford Chemistry Department bring all equipment and supplies required for one of these labs into the high school classroom, and aid the teacher with set-up and facilitation of the lab during all chemistry sections taught during a regular school day. These labs cover topics that fit within the California Curriculum Standards, however they are presented with an emphasis on how these concepts apply in the real world.

There is no cost to participate.