Professional Development

In super-diverse classroom contexts, students come from varied migration channels, immigration statuses, languages, countries of origin, and religions, which contribute to new and complex social configurations of the classroom. Super-diversity thus encourages educators and researchers to draw on nuanced understandings of the complexity that it brings to bear in educational settings and reconsider instructional approaches that we have believed to be effective. This chapter provides an insight into the complexity of teaching science in linguistically super-diverse classrooms with the case of Riverview High School.

Bioinformatics—a rapidly developing discipline that integrates mathematical and computational techniques with biological knowledge for applications in medicine, the environment, and other important aspects of life—is an example of an emerging field that illustrates the need for a greater focus on STEM integration in K12 education. Studies on teaching bioinformatics in high school reveal difficulties that arise from a lack of curricular resources and teacher knowledge to effectively integrate disciplinary content. In this study, we investigated challenges teachers experienced in teaching a problem-based bioinformatics unit after participating in professional development (PD) activities that were carefully constructed using research-based effective PD characteristics.

In this article we describe an Informal Science Institution (ISI)-based professional learning program for science teacher leaders (STLs) developed within the context of a research-practice partnership (RPP).

Specific to the topic of oxidation–reduction (redox), teachers are obligated by the discipline to prioritise symbolic traditions such as writing equations, documenting oxidation states, and describing changes (e.g., what undergoes oxidation/reduction). Although the chemistry education research community endorses connecting the vertices of Johnstone's triangle, how symbolic traditions undermine chemistry concept development, especially during lesson planning and teaching, is underexplored. To clarify this gap, we use the Mangle of Practice framework to unpack the clash between symbolic vs. particulate-focused instruction.

Despite years of research and practice inspired by chemistry education research, a recent report shows that US secondary instruction is not aligned with current national reform-based efforts. One means to mitigate this discrepancy is focusing on pedagogical conceptual change, its precursors (higher self-efficacy and pedagogical discontentment), and the subtleties of its mechanisms (assimilation and accommodation). In this study, we investigate the final reflections of participants (N = 35) who completed our professional development program known as the VisChem Institute (VCI).

The research contained in this article used qualitative methods to articulate and test the design underlying our professional learning cycle by advancing conjecture mapping, a device by which the embodiments of the design are made transparent to be analyzed in practice.

K- 12 Computer Science (CS) education is developing rapidly but still lacks a comprehensive measure for CS teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). We respond to this need by describing the design of a CS-PCK instrument for ‘Algorithms and Programming’ that measures three broad constructs: (a) teachers’ understanding of standards and standards-alignment, (b) teachers’ formative assessment practices, and (c) teachers’ self-efficacy for teaching and assessing CS.

This position paper advocates supporting CS teacher professional learning by supplementing existing curriculum-specific teacher PD with standards-aligned PD that focuses on teachers' conceptual understanding of CS standards and ability to adapt instruction based on student understanding of concepts underlying the CS standards.

The Socioscientific Issues Teaching and Learning (SSI-TL) framework is a guide for developing an instructional approach to learning experiences focused on socioscientific issues (SSI). Despite the potential benefits of SSI learning, teachers often struggle to implement this approach in their classrooms, and one of the most prominent reasons for this struggle is science teacher concerns and hesitation associated with incorporating social dimensions of the issues into their instruction. The purpose of this article is to provide science teacher educators with tools to help teachers better manage the integration of the social dimensions of SSI in issues-based teaching.

The Socioscientific Issues Teaching and Learning (SSI-TL) framework is a guide for developing an instructional approach to learning experiences focused on socioscientific issues (SSI). Despite the potential benefits of SSI learning, teachers often struggle to implement this approach in their classrooms, and one of the most prominent reasons for this struggle is science teacher concerns and hesitation associated with incorporating social dimensions of the issues into their instruction. The purpose of this article is to provide science teacher educators with tools to help teachers better manage the integration of the social dimensions of SSI in issues-based teaching.