Hi Sue,

Thank you for your comments. The key to maintaining the integrity of the weeklong program is to provide professional development AND real-world coaching. First, we offer a 3-5 hour training at our host institutions, followed by a co-teaching and mentoring experience in the classroom while school is in session. Our Outreach Educators work alongside the teachers on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays, modeling the scientific practices and also coaching them on how to run messy, hands-on science experiments. Teachers also deliver the program themselves on Wednesdays and Thursdays, which helps to build their confidence and competence in running things. On average we spend 9-15 hours a year with teachers, and scaffold their learning over several years. Ongoing support and refresher trainings are always available to our participating teachers as well.

By their third year of participation a teacher is usually ready to run the program independently. This is critical for our expansion as we can then start working with a new cohort of teachers, thereby building teacher capacity. In a couple of our locations we are targeting specific grade levels exclusively in order to build capacity district-wide.

I think that having this kind of individualized professional development works well for teachers and I would love to see more state policymakers consider in-classroom coaching something teachers can receive professional development credit for. Not all states do, however.

Valerie,

One further question related to dissemination. Have you seen differences in how the program works and the support needed at different sites and areas of the country/world? If so, do you make or feel you need to make adjustments to accommodate differences.

Sue

Hi Sue, In terms of student or teacher participation, we don't see a lot of difference. We're currently only in the U.S. and Australia though (Chile coming next). The curriculum is designed to be adaptable for different learners, so gifted students as well as students with special needs have participated. Because we offer content for multiple levels (2nd-10th grade, generally), we can use whatever is appropriate for our students. Plus there is supplemental content and extensions to use by the teacher as needed (much of it is available on our website, bioeyes.org). No child is a zebrafish expert, so anyone can do it!

When we are replicating the program elsewhere, however, there are different considerations to take into account. For example, if a teacher wants to have BioEYES in his/her school and is outside of our area that is a different process than if a university wants to start a BioEYES Center.

Does that answer your question?

We had developed an attitude instrument used for almost 15 years with over 100,000 children. You can check out our all our materials and the attitude instrument in our most recent publication  http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id... in the supporting information tab

Hi Deborah,

We haven’t analyzed how teachers are learning the NGSS practices. Instead we are in the process of looking at how BioEYES has impacted their long-term teaching practices and attributes, and whether there are differences in learning for students taught by Model Teachers versus those co-taught with BioEYES Outreach Educators. For example, elementary teachers self-reported that:

• The teaching practices learned from BioEYES have helped them integrate inquiry-based teaching to include the engagement of students as scientists long-term in their classrooms (93% agreed).
• Collaborative Inquiry and Collaborative Discourse ranked as the highest teaching practices that BioEYES had helped improve in their classrooms (53% agreed).
• Mimicking science practices through hands-on activities & science experiments were ranked as the second highest teaching practice (43% agreed).
• They felt more confident about teaching science and in allowing students to investigate and discover scientific phenomenon, replacing teachers’ transfer of information directly to the student (80%)
• They became innovators in the classroom (73%) by adapting traditional textbook lessons into inquiry-based work using models.
• Their self-efficacy in teaching and delivering hands-on science improved (66%).

Our next paper (in process) will expand on this topic!

That's interesting that 'mimicking science practices' was the second highest-- I think many teachers are confused about the new NGSS practices, since they're not familiar with how scientists use these. I see a big advantage of your project being connecting teachers and scientists!

Hi Alex,

I would add to Steve's comment below that we integrate place-based learning into this project when we discuss habitats/environments (tropical vs. temperate). Place-based learning is integrated heavily into an environmental project we have called "Your Watershed, Your Backyard." For the latter middle school students conduct field studies in their local watershed and schoolyard. That program also uses zebrafish: students raise them in stream water collected on their field trips in order to study how pollution affects living organisms.

Hi Kemi, Great question and I think this is still a work in progress. It is a little tricky in that we are only in the classroom for a week and so don't get to know the students as well as we'd like. This makes it hard to incorporate their experiences and interests into the science experiment we're doing with fish. However, we looked at our curriculum and thought about ways to implement culturally relevant pedagogy. For example, if we're teaching genetics we try and talk about scientists who are coming from diverse backgrounds to bring in different perspectives and provide role models as opposed to simply talking about white, male scientists. We can also talk about how the zebrafish (see Keith Cheng's work at UPenn) were used to identify a gene responsible for about 25-40% of human skin color variation between Africans and Northern Europeans. Africans have the original amino acid (Africa first!) and it mutated to Northern Europeans. With older students that can lead to broader discussions about biology and race.

We have students work in small groups and as a team. We set high expectations and give them the title of Scientist and greet them as such. I tell them that the tasks they will be doing are the same ones our scientists do in the lab (e.g., pipeting, caring for the fish, mating fish, using a microscope) because I want them to see themselves as scientists. This is not hogwash; our students and scientists do conduct many similar tasks. I also teach my staff and share with other teachers how to stick with a student to help them with their understanding so they feel positive about answering questions instead of feeling like they gave a "wrong" answer. How we respond and interact can carry so many micro-messages that we may not even be aware of so patience and compassion is important in order to create that safe place for students to learn and explore. I have blogged about this topic, though don't claim to be an expert by any means! I'm interested in learning about real-world examples of how to adapt science activities so they are culturally relevant. I have had trouble finding specific examples of science activities taught in this way. I am sure there are more areas we could improve on and I welcome your thoughts.

Hi Pam, I think that the teachers that become Model Teachers have the energy and the drive to begin with and so we really don't need to push them to do it. They want to do it and continue from year to year with it. Some of the teachers that started with the program back in 2002 in Philadelphia are still Model Teachers. When the program was brought to Baltimore in 2007 and piloted, those teachers are still doing the program every year and continue to have us train other teachers at their school as well. I think the content connects to so many other areas in a teacher's curriculum that they refer to it throughout the year and kids continue to make connections to other topics.

For your latter point, I recommend reaching out to our executive director, Jamie Shuda, who is at the University of Pennsylvania. She can talk to you about how to replicate it on a larger scale. It would require training teachers and/or staff to deliver the program. If you go to the Contact page of our website you'll find her info on the sidebar to the left: http://bioeyes.org/contact.php .

Hi Katie, We have not used other organisms thus far but perhaps we will in the future. There is a lot we can expand upon with zebrafish. For example, there are teachers who use zebrafish every week throughout the entire school year, working on all kinds of experiments! For a sampling, see http://online.liebertpub.com/toc/zeb/6/2 . Zebrafish are versatile, easy to transport, relatively inexpensive, and kids seem to really respond to them. Plus their young are transparent so you can see the cells dividing and forming organs. That means students can work with them without having to harm them. I don't know too many organisms that provide these advantages.

Hi Teagan, I will second what Steve has said, because of the time constraints it is a bit of a challenge to have the students design a new fish tank or way of looking at the fish. Both the Philly and Utah sites have started a temperature experiment where student can choose to grow their embryos at different temperatures. The students choose the temperatures and then decide how to collect the data to answer their scientific question. This has worked well in 5th, 7th and 10th grades and puts them even more into the scientist role and builds scientific curiosity. 

Love the project, the video and the reactions of the students! Your response above makes me wonder about whether you target the same schools so that student encounters with the fish can become more investigation-oriented over time, or if you need to hop from school to school? For example, might a student in 5th grade look at the developmental cycle, and then in 7th grade do the temperature investigation? are there opportunities to see how this experience has shaped student attitudes about science over time, years past their first encounter?

Hi Rachel,

Thanks for your comment! We do have a lot of overlap in the students we see and that is our hope to see them more than once during their schooling. Our curriculum is designed to build. The second graders look at life cycle, fifth graders do temperature, 7th do a simple Mendelian genetics experiment and 10th do a test cross (trying to determine the genotype of a normal looking fish). What gets covered at each grade level is complementary and engaging no matter the number of times we have seen a student. On our pre and post assessments have a box that students check if they are already done a BioEYES experiment so that we can compare their responses with those who are seeing BioEYES for the first time. This will hopefully answer the question about how this opportunity shapes the experiences with students over time. 

Cheers,

Judith