Shell Foundation sponsors a program at Louisiana State University called Shell Undergraduate Recruitment and Geoscience Education (SURGE). The purpose of SURGE is to help local high school science teachers incorporate geology into their classrooms by providing resources and training. As part of this program, we ran a workshop for high school biology teachers at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge on June 4-6, 2007. We had the teachers do a series of activities on fossil shark teeth to illustrate evolution and introduce basic earth science concepts such as geologic time, superposition, and faunal succession and provided the teachers with lesson plans and materials. Our activities follow the learning cycle model (Atkins and Karpus, 1962; Piaget, 1970; NRC, 2000) and is problem based learning (Spiro et al., 1988; Boud and Feletti, 1997). We take advantage of the curiosity of sharks shared by most people, and allow students to explore variations among shark teeth and to explain the causes of those variations.
