THE KANSAS CITY STAR, February 28, 2001, Wednesday  Pg. B1

HEADLINE: Video series puts teacher at head of a larger class

BYLINE: KATE BEEM; The Kansas City Star

    Ken Bingman stood amid the bustle of his classroom Tuesday,
seemingly oblivious to the camera crew milling about and the
teen-agers coming and going.

    For Bingman, an award-winning biology teacher at Shawnee Mission
West High School, this film crew wasn't much different from the
others. He figures his classes have been taped about a dozen times
since 1999, when the Kansas Board of Education adopted science
standards that downplayed evolution.

      "Maybe people aren't willing to do it, but I don't mind it,"
Bingman said.

    Bingman has appeared on PBS' "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" and
local newscasts. But Tuesday's taping should be more lasting than
some of his other appearances on the small screen.

    Bingman's methods will be featured along with those of biology
teachers from across the country as part of a four-part video series
on teaching evolution, the theory that living things share common
ancestors but have changed over time.

    The series will be offered as a resource after the airing this
fall of an eight-hour PBS series, "Evolution."

    WGBH-TV, the PBS affiliate in Boston, is producing "Evolution"
and its other components, including the video teaching series, a Web
site on evolution and a Web-based course for biology teachers.

    The project was in its formative stages in 1999, when the Kansas
Board of Education first took up the science standards, which
determine what students will learn and be tested on.

    Bingman, a 38-year teaching veteran and the 1999 Biological
Sciences Curriculum Study Teacher of the Year, was on the 27-member
committee of science teachers and professors who wrote the original
standards that the state board rejected. Earlier this month, after
elections that changed its makeup, the board adopted new science
standards that emphasize evolution. Bingman helped write the new
standards.

    But Bingman's involvement in the Kansas evolution dispute wasn't
the attraction for WGBH, said Amy Tonkonogy, a senior project
director at the TV station. The video's producers were more
interested in Bingman's reputation as a teacher.

    The video series features model methods to teach evolution.
Often, middle school and high school teachers become isolated within
their classrooms and don't get a chance to see how others in their
field teach, said Pam Pelletier, a WGBH advisory board member and the
content adviser for the video series.

    Bingman's lesson Tuesday focused on introducing his students to
the theory of evolution in a creative and sensitive way. Students
broke into groups to study different pieces of evidence that support
evolution.

    Freshman Raj Sharmacharya, 14, studied natural selection and how
it relates to the other evidence for evolution, which he said is
"the only way to explain how we came here."

    His classmates, freshmen Allison DeBell and Katie Thomasset, said
they weren't convinced. They said about a third of the students in
their honors biology class believes scientific evidence points toward
ideas such as creationism, the idea that God specially created the
universe and everything in it.

    But Katie, 15, said students should learn about evolution in
science class, even if they do not accept it.

    "It gives you a comparison of beliefs so you can figure out what
you think is right," she said.