Professional Development

Flourishing in today's global society requires citizens that are both intelligent consumers and producers of scientific understanding. Indeed, the modern world is facing ever‐more complex problems that require innovative ways of thinking about, around, and with science. As numerous educational stakeholders have suggested, such skills and abilities are not innate and must, therefore, be taught (e.g., McNeill & Krajcik, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 45(1), 53–78. 2008).

This executive summary captures the results of the National Survey on Supporting Struggling Mathematics Learners in the Middle Grades, a study designed and conducted by EDC. The survey was conducted as part of the Strengthening Mathematics Intervention project, which was funded by the National Science Foundation. This executive summary describes the key results from schools across the United States, highlighting the national landscape of mathematics intervention (MI) classes.

American Museum of Natural History. (2018). Writing a Scientific Explanation. Retrieved from https://www.amnh.org/explore/curriculum-collections/integrating-literac….

Disruptions in Ecosystems is a middle school curriculum unit with supporting teacher materials. The unit includes five chapters, each focused on a specific phenomenon related to ecosystem disruption, including questions around the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone and the invasion of zebra mussels in the Great Lakes and Hudson River.

Kastel, D. (2017, August 25). Classroom videos from disruptions in ecosystems unit [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.teachingchannel.org/blog/2017/08/25/ngss-from-theory-to-pra…

Much of the literature on science teaching suggests that elementary teachers lack relevant prior experiences with science. This study begins to reframe the deficit approach to research in science teaching by privileging the experiences elementary teachers have had with science – both in and out of schools – throughout their lives. Our work uses identity as a lens to examine the complexities of elementary teachers’ narrative accounts of their experiences with science over the course of their lives.

Science education stakeholders worldwide are engaged in efforts to support teachers' noticing and making sense of students' thinking in science. Here we introduce the design of a science teaching video club and present a study of its implementation. The current design extends prior research on video clubs as a form of professional development for supporting mathematics teachers. Results indicate that the current design supported science teachers in noticing and discussing students' thinking in sustained and meaningful ways.

The study examines geometry teachers' video club discussions in a two-year professional development intervention that combined lesson study, video clubs, and animation discussions to promote teacher noticing of students' prior knowledge. Most discussions pertained to student conceptions (78%), followed by pedagogy (19%). Discussion of students' prior knowledge surfaced only when talking about student conceptions or pedagogy.

Lee, J., Kim, J-H., Kim, S-M., & Lim, W. (2018). How to envision equitable mathematics instruction: Views of U.S. and Korean preservice teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education, 69, 275–288. doi: 10.1016/j.tate.2017.10.010