Brainstorm documentation

Had a brainstorm this morning, while listening to a radio report on an NSF grant that will pay college tuition for education students who commit to two years teaching in CPS. Arne Duncan was talking about how they're trying to steer these future teachers (who have strong math and science backgrounds) into teaching early grades, because "If the teachers don't know the subject, the students won't know it."

So my brainstorm, which I'm writing about only to document it so that I have some chance of remembering it later, is this: use teachers to tutor each other in these high-end, complex subjects. NBPTS, for example, believes that high-quality high school math teachers need to have a sense of the important ideas in both calculus and statistics, even if it isn't part of their curriculum. If we believe that those ideas, that sense of where this is all going, is important, then let's consider having teachers who know that stuff tutor their colleagues in it.

It starts as an in-house project, and if it's successful, we pitch it to the area officers and the board, to try to create a path to certification/endorsement for elementary teachers: take a course given by a local high-school teacher, pass it, and get a math endorsement. Much easier, maybe, than the existing paths?