Supporting Teachers Appropriation of Ambitious Teaching Practice Within the Context of Implementing Complex Multidimensional Science Assessments

Expectations and opportunities for student learning in science are expanding to involve students in making sense of and addressing real questions and problems in the world around them. At the same time, school districts are seeking innovative ways to support teachers to provide instruction that takes into account students’ perspectives and uses those perspectives to teach science. WestEd, San Diego Unified School District, RAND, and Northwestern University are collaborating on this project that seeks to understand how a large, urban school district implements a practice-based professional learning program for teachers. The program employs performance assessments as a lever for instructional improvement by eliciting, centering, and advancing students’ thinking in middle school science classrooms. The project uses a design-based implementation research approach, which means implementation of the innovation is coupled with study of how the innovation plays out. Data are collected to inform improvement of the approach in real time, examining the implementation of the program as it works through existing school and district structures. The program focuses on teacher support, and the research of how this support plays out is designed to understand whether, under what conditions, how, and why support for teachers that is geared around the enactment and principled analysis of artifacts from performance assessments shapes teachers’ practices. Data collected include observations, surveys, interviews, and artifacts across multiple stakeholders within the district and the research-practice partnership.

The research enhances understanding of 1) how and why practice-based professional learning that uses performance assessments as a lever for instructional improvement supports changes in science instruction, 2) what it takes to support teachers in recognizing, engaging with, and building on students’ assets within and beyond their implementation of these assessments, and 3) the ways in which organizational structures and conditions intersect with the implementation of the PL program as the partnership works to transform instruction across the district. The project impacts directly 70 middle school science teachers and their 18,000 students during the project period. The research practice partnership also is building capacity for adaptation of the professional learning model to new grades and schools and development of an open-access set of tools designed to be used flexibly by educational stakeholders across the country.