High

This research investigates a design and development approach to improving science teachers’ access to effective professional development (PD) in a fully online, asynchronous environment. Working with a small number of teachers, this study explores how a design combining social capital mechanisms with essential teacher learning and PD characteristics supported teachers’ abilities to participate in the online course and collaboratively build knowledge.

We examine the teacher learning that results from participating in a two-year professional development intervention that combined lesson study, video clubs, and animation discussions. We investigate whether and how five teachers’ attention to student thinking changed when implementing problem-based lessons that they collaboratively designed. Using Sherin and van Es’ (2009) framework, we analyzed 14 lessons taught over two consecutive years.

Sandoval, W. A., Kawasaki, J., & Clark, H. F. (2020). Characterizing science classroom discourse across scales. Research in Science Education.

Students who earned high marks during the proof semester of a geometry course were interviewed to understand what high-achieving students actually took away from the treatment of proof in geometry. The findings suggest that students had turned proving into a rote task, whereby they expected to mark a diagram and prove two triangles congruent.

Being nice is difficult to critique. Niceness is almost always portrayed and felt as a positive quality. In schools, nice teachers are popular among students, parents, and administrators. And yet Niceness, as a distinct set of practices and discourses, is not actually good for individuals, institutions, or communities because of the way it maintains and reinforces educational inequity.

Esposito, R. M. M, Harris, C., Berkowitz, A. R., & Pregnal, M. (2019). The joys of teaching ecology in K-12 and informal settings. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 17(9), 538-539. https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2122

The Investigating Immigration to the U.S. module focuses on describing, comparing, and making sense of categorical variables. Students investigate questions such as: Are there more immigrants in the U.S. today than in previous years? Where have most immigrants been coming from? Are immigrants as likely as the U.S. born to be participating in the labor force?