• A continuing challenge for the Bridges initiative is the tight restrictions from the school district on release time for teacher professional development. In reality, release time is rarely approved for teachers for professional development activities that occur during the school day. Although most of the activity funded during this reporting period took place after-school and in classrooms, it was challenging to obtain release time for the teachers involved in the RTG so that they could observe colleagues teaching the lesson they had developed collaboratively and could present the results of their findings at the California Science Teachers Association Annual Meeting. As interest in Lesson Study and the RTG's continues to grow, we anticipate that gaining approval for release time will continue to be an issue.
• An important part of the classroom-based partnership is SEP Staff visiting classrooms when partnership lessons are taking place. These visits provide a time to observe the lessons as they are occurring and provide informal consultation and feedback on what we have observed. Due to the significant loss of staff described elsewhere in this report, the number of classroom visits that the remaining SEP Staff conducted during the 2003-2004 year was significantly decreased. This decrease had a recognizable effect on the relationships staff developed with teachers and volunteers and on the knowledge staff had about individual teams, their successes and the challenges they faced. We hope to alleviate this in the 2004-2005 year by hiring two new Academic Coordinators to help implement this work.

• The publication listed below guided the development and teaching of the Architecture of Life course and has been assigned as homework for each offering of the course: Duckworth, E. (1996). "The Having of Wonderful Ideas" and Other Essays on Teaching and Learning. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
• The publication listed below guided the development and teaching of the Architecture of Life course and has been assigned as homework for each offering of the course: Hawkins, D. (1970). Messing About in Science. In The ESS Reader (pp. 37-44). Boston, MA: Education Development Center, Inc.
• Parts of the following publication have been assigned as homework for the Architecture of Life course. This book nicely presents many biological concepts, skillfully using drawings and analogies to make difficult concepts more understandable: Hoagland, M. and B. Dodson, The Way Life Works: The Science Lover¿s Illustrated Guide to How Life Grows, Develops, Reproduces, and Gets Along, Times Books, 1998.

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