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September/October 1999
By Kelly Graves-Desai
In 1983, Utah State University started a program designed to train K-12 teachers to teach water conservation, an important topic in the arid state. But the International Institute for Water Education–a joint project of the university’s education and engineering colleges–never really won the interest of schools.
So in 1994, education researcher Geoffrey Smith, one of the program’s founders, decided to get the message out through another group: substitute teachers. Within a year, the water education institute had become the Substitute Teacher Training Institute, where subs learn basic teaching skills. Smith also got funding from the U.S. Department of Education for a study on what makes substitutes effective.
Subs, says Smith, usually rely on schools to provide the day’s lesson plans. But what if the sub knows nothing about the topic? What if no lesson plan is prepared at all? Smith reasoned that subs need to have some backup lesson based on a topic they care about or at least know about. He subsequently developed a science curriculum for subs. With funding from Utah’s Environmental Protection Agency, he visits schools and trains subs to teach specific science lessons such as using bubbles to demonstrate surface tension.
"They can bring this one lesson to a classroom. Kids get really excited when a sub says, ‘We’ll do your regular work first and then try this,’" Smith says. "It’s a question of what you want from a class. If we ask a sub to teach something they are good at, they may end up being more effective." In other words, kids will at least learn something. According to Smith, many of the subs he’s trained say they are no longer greeted by kids with groans and spitballs, but by students eager to see if they’ll spend their classtime building boats or blowing bubbles.
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