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COVID-19 has thrust educators into a period of uncertainty, complicating conventional ways of teaching and learning. We suspect that the pandemic has magnified the challenges that some high school teachers already experience, particularly when they are the sole chemistry teacher at their school. The pandemic has likely inhibited collegial interactions and access to professional development (PD). Our reflections from redesigning a face-to-face PD program to one that is remotely delivered provide recommendations that advance PD accessibility and interactivity to mitigate isolation and other longstanding challenges teachers may face. In this article, we discuss how the cognitive learning model informed emergent teaching practices that guided the transformation of the PD’s implementation for 20 high school chemistry teachers.

Researchers have typically identified and characterized teachers’ knowledge bases (e.g., pedagogical content knowledge and subject matter knowledge) in an effort to improve enacted instructional strategies. As shown by the Refined Consensus Model (RCM), understanding teacher learning, beliefs, and practices is predicated on the interconnections of such knowledge bases. However, lesson planning (defined as the transformation of subject matter knowledge to enacted pedagogical content knowledge) remains underexplored despite its central position in the RCM. We aim to address this gap by developing a conceptual framework known as Pedagogical Chemistry Sensemaking (PedChemSense).

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) have been imperative for informing many facets of the chemistry education research field, one of which includes the professional development (PD) of high school teachers. While many researchers and practitioners have responded to the NGSS’ calls for reform by attending to internal factors that influence the PD’s design, resources, and facilitation, there is less attention on extant factors that may negatively affect PD uptake and fidelity. Such factors encompass traditions of teaching chemistry or chemistry-related imprecisions within the NGSS themselves. If left unaddressed, these factors can act as anchors preventing advancements toward students’ particle-level explanations and their chemistry conceptual understanding. In this article, we investigate the uptake and fidelity of our own PD program known as the VisChem Institute.

This article describes the experience of using the InquirySpace software in a classroom that practices full inclusion for ninth grade physics.

Interview with Steve Roderick about helping teachers on the InquirySpace project bring more authentic science experiences to their classes.

The process of using Learning Analytics (LA) to improve teaching works from the assumption that data should be readily shared between stakeholders in an educational organization. However, the design of LA tools often does not account for considerations such as data privacy, transparency and trust among stakeholders. Research in human-centered design of LA does attend to these questions, specifically with a focus on including direct input from K-12 educators. In this paper, we present a series of design studies to articulate and refine conjectures about how privacy and transparency might influence better trust-building and data sharing within four school districts in the United States.

Globally relevant, action-oriented learning, like Project-Based Inquiry (PBI) Global, is a powerful tool to increase classroom engagement and help students understand the world in which they live. Today, Person Early College for Innovation and Leadership (PECIL) is engaged in their fourth year of collaboration with the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation’s PBI Global team.

In a project designed to help create the next generation of problem-solvers, North Carolina State University researchers challenged a group of 11^th graders to investigate and find solutions to a global problem: that billions of people lack access to clean water and sanitation services.

This week is Global Goals week — an annual week of action, awareness, and accountability for the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, which are aimed at addressing global challenges like poverty and hunger. In North Carolina, two schools have integrated purpose-driven, interdisciplinary, and collaborative inquiry into their classrooms to empower students and teachers as local and global change agents during a particularly uncertain school year.

This study explored how engaging in critical inquiry through Project-Based Inquiry (PBI) Global fostered social action with high school students. Drawing on theoretical perspectives from critical inquiry and social action and employing a collective case study approach, we focused on six diverse students from two of the 18 teams who participated in a PBI Global examining global water and sanitation over a two-month period.