It started with a call to the past. About 15 years ago, Murray Jensen was teaching anatomy and physiology courses as a faculty member at the University of Minnesota when he heard about the College in the Schools (CIS) program offered by the College of Continuing & Professional Studies. As a former high school science teacher, he saw an immediate connection.
“A dream job for me is working with high school teachers because I know them,” Jensen says. “I know their headaches, I know their successes. So when I saw this opportunity come up, I thought ‘This is something I would enjoy doing.’”
Now more than a decade into this endeavor, Jensen still teaches the Human Physiology, Technology, and Medical Devices course offered through CIS in addition to his research and teaching load as a professor in the Department of Biology Teaching and Learning. Through CIS, Minnesota schools can offer University-level courses taught by high school educators with oversight by University faculty. In Jensen’s role, he works directly with teachers at 25 high schools across the state to run the course and find ways to not only teach students the content, but build out exams, projects, and different forms of assessment that work for each individual school.
“I can see a spectrum of where the students who take this course are at,” Jensen says. “So I talk with the teachers about how to find out where their students are and proceed accordingly. You don't want to just bury them with PowerPoint slides.”
This collaborative work with the teachers themselves is a big part of Jensen’s role. He meets with them in person three times annually to prepare and work through elements of teaching the course. While using these meetings to help offer insights and strategies for the high school teachers who help lead the course, he also sees how these gatherings offer another critical element for teacher success in this program.
“We’ve got teachers coming together, often year after year, with people who have the same things on their plate and similar stories from their schools,” says Jensen “Often they’re the only person teaching this course in their district. So these gatherings and our emails after the fact help build some connections with fellow physiology educators across Minnesota.”
Over the past few years, more than 1,000 students have enrolled in his course annually across the state. A particular focus in the course is offering students instruction through guided inquiry, where there’s minimal use of presentations and lectures and a larger focus on students learning scientific topics with one another. Through this effort, Jensen can help foster discovery and knowledge of human physiology while also offering support in training the next generation of students as they consider life after high school.
“Not surprisingly, this course accelerates my top students in their college level learning,” says Nancy Cripe, a high school science teacher at Minnehaha Academy in Minneapolis. “But what I've observed, and delighted in, over the years is the increased confidence of some of my more tentative students as they contemplate pursuing a college degree in the sciences. They've learned to work as small teams; they've learned by inquiry, not by memorization; they've learned from experts in the field; they've risen to the worthy challenge of an advanced science course and genuinely succeeded. And when they head off to college, the field of the health sciences or biomedical engineering is a much more feasible goal than it was before.” — Lance Janssen