The teachers in our program perform a summer of bench research in biomedical research labs at the end of our 15-month program. The issue is that some of these teachers do not have the background or motivation to be successful in this activity. The P.I. mentors often have unreasonable expectations and what these teachers can accomplish. This leads to friction and unhappiness. In some cases our teachers have dropped out of the program during the summer. We began to solve this problem by making the summer research part of the program optional to teachers, and by not allowing teachers to participate if we felt they lacked the attitude or skill set to do a good job. In the future we will also counsel our mentors regarding their expectations.
A part of our program is the generation of science suitcases for the classroom. These kits are designed by graduate students in the Biomedical Communications (Medical Arts) program as a part of their masters thesis. They work in collaboration with our staff and a graduate students volunteers from our division. The problem in the past two years is that the Biomedical Communications program is being discontinued because of state budget cuts. The students did not have much motivation to do a good job on the suitcases, and their faculty had little motivation for them to succeed. The students were also assigned other projects which greatly affected the amount of time and effort students could spend on the suitcases. The solution would be to make alternate plans and find others to design the suitcases.
