Teacher Training Program

Are you interested in implementing dynamic, hands-on neuroscience activities in your science classroom?

The Neuroscience Outreach Program at the University of California, San Diego is looking to partner with local high school teachers to promote an accessible, laboratory-style approach of teaching neuroscience to high school students.  We invite you to learn more about this new program and take a look at our curriculum.

The UC San Diego Neuroscience Outreach Teacher Training Program proudly presents three new, hands-on neuroscience lessons.  These lessons are:

  1. Evolutionary Brains
  2. Sheep Neuroanatomy
  3. Communication in the Brain

The lessons are aimed at the high school level; however, they may be adapted for implementation with students of other grade levels.  We hope that you can use all or parts of these lessons in your classrooms to teach your students about the exciting workings of the brain!

Please follow this link to find all of the lesson plans. This google drive folder contains the complete lesson plans, supplemental student worksheets, teacher answer guides, and powerpoint slides.

At this time, our application period to receive free materials to use in these lessons is closed. With the help of our generous funding sources, we hope to re-open the application process soon so that several new schools may participate, at no cost to them. In the meantime, one of the lessons (Evolutionary Brains) can be completed without any special materials.  Furthermore, your school may be able to purchase the materials for the other lessons directly, so that your students may enjoy observing brains, solving mysteries about brain anatomy, and performing experiments to test the chemical and electrical languages of communication in the brain.

A full materials list can be found in the lesson plans, but an abbreviated list is below:

1. Evolutionary Brains: No extra materials required besides print-outs of the electronic materials provided.

2. Sheep Neuroanatomy: 

**Please note that the teacher will have to prepare the brains for this lesson (i.e. partial dissection of brains according to diagrams within the lesson plan)

3. Communication in the Brain:

If you use any of these lesson plans, please fill out our online feedback form (available here), so we can continue to improve our curriculum.

Please feel free to contact us if you have additional questions.