Professional Learning to Navigate Student Uncertainty for Productive Struggle Around Equity-Oriented Sensemaking

Progress in science is motivated and directed by uncertainties. Uncertainty is unavoidable in an endeavor that strives to match theoretical models of the natural world with empirical data. Yet even though uncertainty is a crucial fulcrum for scientific thought, school students are taught science within an overarching assumption about the opposite—that scientific knowledge is certain. This project explores the intellectual leverage of enabling middle school students to experience how scientific work grapples with uncertainty. The overall goal of this project is to understand how teachers can create equitable learning environments for culturally and linguistically diverse learners using Student Uncertainty for Productive Struggle as a pedagogical model in middle school science classrooms. The project has several goals. It is creating an evidence-based and equity-oriented professional learning program that includes teacher engagement to adapt lessons for equity-oriented sensemaking in their classrooms through curricular resources to foster productive struggle and practice. It is authoring reliable and valid measurements of student disposition toward uncertainty and its navigation, an observation protocol of classroom activities, and measures of engagement in learning and student achievement. Finally, it is making recommendations for implementation across a broad range of learning contexts and diversity of student populations, including a framework to guide teachers in designing uncertainty to support student struggle productively.

This four-year project directly involves 25 teachers and indirectly their students in middle schools serving historically underserved communities in Arizona. The pedagogical approach guides teachers in designing, developing, and implementing science classes activities where scientific uncertainties are purposefully incorporated so students experience productive struggle. The project uses a Professional Learning Program to meet this goal. Professional Learning Programs support middle school teachers in gaining the necessary experience, orientation, materials, and tools to utilize the pedagogical approach for productive struggle and to create an equity-oriented sensemaking environment. The science content of the Professional Learning Program includes thematic-focused, solar energy-related phenomena to help teachers develop core concepts and practices across different science subjects (e.g., physics, chemistry, life science, earth science) and understand their technical application. Each summer program begins with examination of a local, relevant phenomenon related to the students’ neighborhoods, identified with the help of an industrial or institutional partner. Then teachers reflect on and design three meaningful lessons so that students connect science content to their lives. The first sequential lessons pertain to the features, functions, and uses of photovoltaic panels. In the subsequent year, they focus on design of solar panels for generating electricity and electromagnetic force. Finally, the curriculum addresses application of semiconductors to the generation of solar power for students’ families and communities. Deliverables of the project include (a) an equity-oriented teaching approach so culturally and linguistically diverse learners become competent in understanding STEM, (b) evidence of changes in teaching perceptions and practices, and (c) an understanding of the impact of teacher pedagogical change on students’ equitable learning opportunities and learning outcomes.