Elementary

How can we align activities with instructional goals to support student understanding of matter and materials? The Building a Tower Task is intended to elicit preservice teachers’ CKT about descriptions and appropriate uses of materials based on their properties.

What kinds of questions should guide investigations of matter? The Questions to Investigate task is intended to elicit preservice teachers’ CKT related to asking questions to frame investigations of changes in matter. The task presents a variety of student-posed questions for preservice teachers to evaluate in terms of their quality and appropriateness. The CKT tasks are intended as a complement to your existing instructional activities in order to elicit and probe preservice teachers’ CKT.

What kinds of questions should guide investigations of matter? The Questions to Investigate task is intended to elicit preservice teachers’ CKT related to asking questions to frame investigations of changes in matter. The task presents a variety of student-posed questions for preservice teachers to evaluate in terms of their quality and appropriateness. The CKT tasks are intended as a complement to your existing instructional activities in order to elicit and probe preservice teachers’ CKT.

The Responsive Math Teaching Project's (RMT) Planning and Coaching Protocol is an 18-page booklet that includes the RMT Instructional Model as well as a planning and coaching guide for each phase of the RTM instructional cycle. These guides provide questions and facilitation moves to support educators in the planning, implementing, coaching, and/or reflecting on an RMT lesson.

The Responsive Math Teaching (RMT) Instructional Model breaks high-quality math teaching down into seven core components:

The ASET Science and Engineering Practice (SEP) Tools are designed to guide you to critically analyze how students are meaningfully engaged in the specific components of the SEP that you have selected to focus on for your lesson or unit. These specific components are outlined within the tool for each SEP.

The ASET Toolkit is a Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) planning toolkit designed to help science educators plan lessons and units that integrate the 3 dimensions outlined in the Framework (NRC, 2012). The tools are not meant to be used in isolation, but with peers to promote discourse for understanding the goals and aligning instruction for the NGSS.

Although the use of active learning pedagogies in college science courses has been demonstrated to improve student learning and engagement, lecture‐based methods still feature predominantly across university courses. Often lacking meaningful opportunities to learn about and test out new pedagogies, faculty have been slow to adopt and enact new teaching practices. Partnerships in which faculty facilitate teacher professional development may provide an important space for faculty learning and innovation related to college instruction.

Hayes, K. (2019). Justice in Science Education: How to Honor Student Epistemologies While Supporting 3-Dimensional Science Teaching. In J. Settlage & A. Johnston (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2019 Science Education at the Crossroads Conference (pp. 28-29). Montgomery, AL.

This study explores disciplinary literacy instruction integrated within an elementary engineering unit in an urban classroom. A multidisciplinary team of university literacy and engineering educators and classroom teachers served as the research team for this case study. A social semiotic language theory (systemic functional linguistics) and a framework of mechanistic reasoning informed the instruction and analysis of classroom discourse and student writing.