WOSU News and Public Affairs Director Mike Thompson facilitates the discussion. The forum integrates video profiles of Project Mentor, the AT&T Success Centers, and Academic Acceleration Academy.

The panel consisted of:

• Bill Wise, South-Western City Schools Superintendent
• Nancy Nestor-Baker, United Way of Central Ohio Administrator
• Haley Ford, Westerville North High School Senior

A panel of community stakeholders analyzed the implications of dropping out and highlights local initiatives to help students finish school at a forum, “American Graduate.”

The panel consisted of:

• James Moore III, Professor of Counseling Education at the Ohio State University and the Co-director of the AT&T Success Centers, which help high risk 9th graders at Linden McKinley and South High School in Columbus
•  Steve Votaw, the Executive Director of Learn4Life Columbus, which addresses nonacademic barriers to student success
• Attorney Frederick Ransier III, who heads the advisory committee of the Near East Side Redevelopment Partnership that is working to revitalize the neighborhood surrounding University Hospital East
• Barbara Siemer, the founder of the Siemer Institute for Family Stability, which helps families at risk of homelessness stay in their homes and keep kids in their current schools
• Keith Bell, the Chief Academic Officer of Columbus City Schools.

American Graduate is part of a national initiative launched by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to improve high school graduation rates and help stop the damaging school trend of school dropouts—estimated to be more than a million students a year.

The guests are the authors of two innovative books on the subject. “In The Faith Instinct”‘s Nicholas Wade of the New York Times examines the scientific evidence for religion’s role in evolution. The book has been described as a turning point in the religion evolution debate.

Lionel Tiger is the Charles Darwin Anthropologist at Rutgers University, and co-author, with Michael McGuire, of “God’s Brain,” which has been called the best book on the nature of religion to appear in some time.

The program was supported by a grant from The Templeton Foundation.

Taped on Oct. 5, 2011 at WOSU@COSI.

Download teacher’s guide (PDF, 132K)

Technological design is a critical component of many scientific ventures. This lesson challenges students to design a device that keeps an ice core frozen for 24 hours. After watching the video, students design and test an ice storage unit that keeps the ice frozen for 24 hours. Throughout the design process student teams share and critique their plans.
Download teacher’s guide (PDF, 114K)

In this lesson students will learn how an ice core provides a record of past climates. Students will create a timeline of their life experiences, analyze model glacier data, and create an ice core diagram of the Dust Bowl years.

Download teacher’s guide (PDF, 116K)

Streams of hungry customers arrive at a bakery with a specific craving. Ingredients, cooks, and ovens must be carefully managed to produce the right food at the right time to keep customers happy. The goods produced by the bakery share similar ingredients, so choice is important and is always a trade-off between recipes.

The Bakery Shop leads users to recognize that people have many wants, that wants are unlimited and resources are scarce. The goal is to enable students to explain how resources can be used in various ways, identify goods and services, and recognize money as the generally accepted medium of exchange for goods and services.

• Emphasizing how people’s use of rhetoric effects how people’s ideas are judged
• Roles: Members of hospital board, doctors who are advocating for their respective patients
• Roles shift to allow different perspectives
• Dramatic inquiry process makes students understand the entire decision-making process from multiple perspectives

Teacher – Matt Freeman, High School Science (anatomy)

Teacher – Lorraine Gaughenbaugh, Reynoldsburg, OH, 3^rd grade, 21 students