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Documenting Professional Learning Focused on Implementing High-Quality Instructional Materials in Mathematics: The AIM–TRU Learning Cycle
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The research contained in this article used qualitative methods to articulate and test the design underlying our professional learning cycle by advancing conjecture mapping, a device by which the embodiments of the design…
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Recent circumstances due to the COVID-19 pandemic and restrictions on entering public schools have created barriers for prospective teachers (PT) to gain valuable exposure to real classrooms. As a result, we have…
Secondary Chemistry Teacher Learning: Precursors for and Mechanisms of Pedagogical Conceptual Change
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Despite years of research and practice inspired by chemistry education research, a recent report shows that US secondary instruction is not aligned with current national reform-based efforts. One means to mitigate this…
Investigating the Mangle of Teaching Oxidation–Reduction with the VisChem Approach: Problematising Symbolic Traditions that Undermine Chemistry Concept Development
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Specific to the topic of oxidation–reduction (redox), teachers are obligated by the discipline to prioritise symbolic traditions such as writing equations, documenting oxidation states, and describing changes (e.g., what…
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In this article we describe an Informal Science Institution (ISI)-based professional learning program for science teacher leaders (STLs) developed within the context of a research-practice partnership (RPP…
Professional Development for STEM Integration Analyzing Bioinformatics Teaching by Examining Teachers' Qualities of Adaptive Expertise
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Bioinformatics—a rapidly developing discipline that integrates mathematical and computational techniques with biological knowledge for applications in medicine, the environment, and other important aspects of life—is an…
Beyond the Design of Assessment Tasks: Expanding the Assessment Toolkit to Support Teachers’ Formative Assessment Practices in Elementary Science Classrooms
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Teachers experience challenges in effectively using formative assessment practices in their classrooms. In the US, only 28% of elementary teachers report using formative assessment. This study highlights the need to design…
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Do your students ever share ideas that are only peripherally related to the discussion you are having? We discuss ways to minimize and deal with such contributions.
Do your students ever share ideas…
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In super-diverse classroom contexts, students come from varied migration channels, immigration statuses, languages, countries of origin, and religions, which contribute to new and complex social configurations of the…
Examining Elementary Science Teachers' Responses to Assessments Tasks Designed to Measure Their Content Knowledge for Teaching About Matter and its Interactions
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Despite the importance of developing elementary science teachers' content knowledge for teaching (CKT), there are limited assessments that have been designed to measure the full breadth of their CKT at scale. Our overall…
“Unnatural How Natural It Was”: Using a Performance Task and Simulated Classroom for Preservice Secondary Teachers to Practice Engaging Student Avatars in Scientific Argumentation
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Facilitating discussions is a key approach that science teachers use to engage students in scientific argumentation. However, learning how to facilitate argumentation-focused discussions is an ambitious teaching practice…
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Eliciting and interpreting students’ ideas are essential skills in teaching, yet pre-service teachers (PSTs) rarely have adequate opportunities to develop these skills. In this study, we examine PSTs’ patterns of discourse…
Exploring the Potential of an Online Suite of Practice-Based Activities for Supporting Preservice Elementary Teachers in Learning How to Facilitate Argumentation-Focused Discussions in Mathematics and Science
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This study explored the use of a three-part suite of practice-based activities -- one- and two-player online simulations, an avatar-based simulation, and a virtual teaching simulator—for supporting preservice teachers in…
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This report takes stock of what we currently know as well as what we need to know to make classroom assessment maximally beneficial for the teaching and learning of STEM subject matter in K–12 classrooms…
Comparing How College Mathematics Instructors and High-School Teachers Recognize Professional Obligations of Mathematics Teaching when Making Instructional Decisions
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This paper investigates how mathematics instructors' recognition of the professional obligations of mathematics teaching varies based on their institutional environment, specifically whether they teach high school or…
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Teachers must know how to use language to support students in knowledge generation environments that align to the Next Generation Science Standards. To measure this knowledge, this study refines a survey on teachers’…
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Educational policies exist as part of complex systems of many policies, all of which science teachers must make sense before using in practice. Using Actor-Network Theory to view policy translation in assemblages, we…
Intersections of Teacher Noticing and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: A Conceptual Framework to Inform the Design of Teacher Learning
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Teacher noticing scholars are just beginning to explore how to support noticing that is responsive to students' cultural resources. The theoretical basis of the teacher noticing literature affords scholars a range of paths…
Evaluating the Effectiveness of an Online Professional Development for Rural Middle-School Science Teachers
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In rural, geographically dispersed school districts, access to high-quality face-to-face professional development (PD) is challenging. Our study developed and compared the effectiveness of an online PD for middle-school…
Why Does Teacher Learning Vary in Professional Development? Accounting for Organisational Conditions
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Professional development providers often struggle with how some teachers take up and internalise new instructional practices while others have difficulty implementing new ideas and strategies. Teacher personal…
Why Do Teachers Vary in Their Instructional Change During Science PD? The Role of Noticing Students in an Iterative Change Process
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This qualitative study uses a nonlinear, iterative model of teacher learning (Interconnected Model of Professional Growth; Clarke & Hollingsworth, 2002) alongside professional noticing to help understand why elementary…
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We developed an analytic framework related to the suggestions coaches provided to mathematics teachers as they engaged in content-focused coaching cycles. We analyzed 712 suggestions from nine coaches and 58 coaching…
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Our research explores possibilities for cultivating new spaces for preservice secondary science teachers to engage in science. In a content-focused education course, we designed for and studied preservice teachers'…
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Reform efforts in science and mathematics education highlight students’ experiences and sensemaking repertoires as valuable resources for instruction. Yet, there is much to learn about how to cultivate teachers’ capacity…
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Mathematical modeling (MM) - a cyclical process that involves using mathematics to make-sense of and analyze relevant, real-world situations - has the potential to advance equity and challenge spaces of marginalization in…
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Despite interest in how students’ implicit theories—their growth and fixed mindsets about their own learning—affect students as learners, relatively little research on mindset has looked at teachers as learners. This study…
Elementary Teachers’ Knowledge of Using Language as an Epistemic Tool in Science Classrooms: A Case Study
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Language is a fundamental tool for learning science. This study highlights the importance of teacher knowledge in utilising language as a tool for knowledge generation in the classrooms. This case study examines elementary…
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This study examines secondary mathematics teachers’ anticipations of student responses related to a series of cognitively demanding mathematics tasks from multiple mathematical domains presented in the context of voluntary…
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The authors are developing a model for rural science teacher professional development, building teacher expertise and collaboration and creating high-quality science lessons: technology-mediated lesson study (TMLS…
Investigating Teacher–Teacher Feedback: Uncovering Useful Socio-pedagogical Norms for Reform-based Chemistry Instruction
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Teacher–teacher feedback is an important feature of professional learning. However, deeply ingrained socio-pedagogical norms may affect both the nature and content of feedback, constraining its effectiveness. Prior studies…
Elementary Science Teacher Educators Learning Together: Catalyzing Change With Educative Curriculum Materials and Vignette Writing
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In this article, we describe a professional learning community (PLC) for science teacher educators that supported changes in pedagogy through educative curriculum materials and vignette writing.
In this…
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The Innovate to Mitigate (I2M) project poses challenges for secondary-school students to design feasible, innovative strategies that mitigate CO2 emissions and thus global warming. Design is informed by research on problem…
Navigating Socio-emotional Risk Through Comfort-Building in a Physics Teaching Community of Practice: A Case Study
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This descriptive case study examines the process of productively navigating socio-emotional risks and interpersonal tensions encountered by a veteran and pre-service physics teacher during one episode of discussing physics…
Responsive Professional Development: A Facilitation Approach for Teachers' Development in a Physics Teaching Community of Practice
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Providing high-quality professional development for teachers with diverse backgrounds and classroom experience is a challenging task. In this work, we investigate the Illinois Physics and Secondary Schools (IPaSS)…
Designing Educative Curriculum Materials for Teacher Educators: Supporting Preservice Elementary Teachers’ Content Knowledge for Teaching About Matter and Its Interactions
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Research on teacher educators’ professional learning has gained increasing interest within science education. Curriculum materials have been suggested as a means of supporting teacher learning for several decades but have…
Developing and Using a Scalable Assessment to Measure Preservice Elementary Teachers' Content Knowledge for Teaching About Matter
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There is strong agreement in science teacher education of the importance of teachers' content knowledge for teaching (CKT), which includes their subject matter knowledge and their pedagogical content knowledge. However,…
Elementary Preservice Teachers' Responsiveness While Eliciting Students' Initial Arguments and Encouraging Critique in Online Simulated Argumentation Discussions
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Limited research has explored elementary preservice teachers' responsiveness while navigating an argumentation-focused discussion, particularly in an online simulated teaching experience. The purpose of this study was…
Preservice Teachers Noticing and Positioning Students as “Knowers” in Equitable Scientific Argumentation-based Discussions
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This study investigated how preservice elementary teachers' (PSTs) noticed the discourse practices they used to position students and their scientific thinking as they engaged a group of student avatars in argumentation-…
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TU professor studies avatar-based classroom simulations in three-year, $3 million NSF grant.
TU professor studies avatar-based classroom simulations in three-year, $3 million NSF grant.
Kirkman, R. (…
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In this article, we describe our implementation of an innovative approximation of practice in teacher education: chat-based role-play. In so doing, we share our collective experiences as teacher educators about how the…
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In this report section, we discuss the importance of aligning classroom assessments with learning goals and instructional practices to both shape and evaluate students’ learning opportunities.
In this…
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Teachers are increasingly participating in RPPs with the goal of improving their schools and districts. However, we know little about what teachers learn from their involvement in RPPs. This study explores teacher learning…
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This chapter describes an ongoing research-practice partnership with in-service teachers in communities across Oregon focused on broadening participation in STEM fields. We explore how our design-based work with teachers…
Shaping Ambitious Science Teaching to Be Culturally Sustaining and Productive in a Rural Context: Toward a Justice-Centered Ambitious Science Teaching Framework
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Significant science education resources, namely the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and the Ambitious Science Teaching (AST) framework, need an intentional aim of centering social justice for minoritized…
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Abstract concepts, such as gravity, may provide the perfect opportunity to bring phenomena into the classroom. Using phenomena and summary writing together might help student learning since it requires making connections…
Characterizing Adaptive Expertise: Teacher Profiles Based on Epistemic Orientation and Knowledge of Epistemic Tools
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With an ultimate goal of characterizing teachers' movement toward understanding the epistemic complexity of generative learning environments, this study refers to adaptive teaching expertise (AdTex) as a…
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Adopting a complexity perspective, we attempt to understand how teachers shift over time by examining their epistemic orientation to knowledge generation and their understanding of the nature of the epistemic tools of…
Unpacking Teachers’ Orientations Toward a Knowledge Generation Approach: Do We Need to Go Beyond Epistemology?
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This study aimed to assess the effectiveness of a professional development program rooted in knowledge generation theory. Specifically, it sought to examine the changes in teachers' three orientations following…
Centering Educators’ Voices in the Development of Professional Learning for Data-Rich, Place-Based Science Instruction
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This self-reflective case study describes our project team’s efforts to promote equity in science professional learning (PL) by centering the voices of educators in the PL design process and within the course itself. In…
Thinking Critically, Coding Creatively: Elevating Social Studies Through Inquiry-based Learning and Computer Science Integration
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Weaving computer science into the fabric of social studies, rather than teaching it as an isolated skill, makes both subjects more relevant, engaging, and beneficial to students.
Weaving computer…