Welcome to Improving Practice Together, a three-way partnership to support discussion and argumentation  in elementary science education.

We are in the middle of the second year of the partnership and are getting ready to run the teacher leadership academy.  

We are happy to share about the strategies we use to support argumentation, the professional learning model, our measures of change in classroom discourse practices, and our research on the evolution of the partnership.

We hope that everyone who visits will comment on our work!  How does it compare to your own experiences teaching and learning science?  

In addition, we have some specific questions for folks doing similar work.  

1. For teachers:  What discussion and argumentation strategies do you use in your classroom?  
2. For teacher leaders:  What advice do you have for new teacher leaders who will lead professional development for the first time?
3. For districts:  As we think about disseminating our experience in this partnership, what would be most valuable for you to know?
4. For education researchers:  What types of instruments are you using to evaluate classroom discourse, both in whole group and small group talk?  
5. For all people working in partnerships:  What strategies and tools have been effective in ensuring that all partners’ ideas are represented?  What type of data do you find useful to understand the evolution of the partnership?

We look forward to discussing these questions with you!

Warmly,

Coralie, Emily W. and Emily R.

I am very eager to follow your important project as it unfolds! The first thing I noticed with joy in your video was The Circle-a basic strategy! Discussion and argumentation are essential science practices but hard to pull off, especially whole class discussion and facilitation of productive small group work. Our curriculum development work, the Inquiry Project, relied on these exploration and meaning making strategies and ultimately we developed a parallel project Talk Science. 

I’ll toss out one suggestion for preparing teacher leaders: make sure they have plenty of experience as a participant in a productive discussion and time to analyze the ingredients that made the discussion productive - or not. In my experience, not many teachers experienced science learning that included discourse so it isn’t in their bones when they start teaching. 

I look forward to this discussion - a topic very close to my heart!

sally

Thank you for sharing this wonderful project! I recently worked on an education research project involving curriculum development for high school students, with a focus on argumentation from evidence. It's exciting to see a project that introduces these skills to younger students.

I'm curious about two things. One, what are your strategies for introducing the concept of argumentation to students, and what challenges are these strategies designed to navigate? And two, how are you measuring (or planning to measure) gains in students' argumentation skill? Related to part two, what does successful argumentation look like at for elementary students?

Sheila

Hi Sheila,

 

Thank you for your questions. I really had to think about my answer to question one (what are your strategies for introducing the concept of argumentation to students, and what challenges are these strategies designed to navigate?), and I may need to add to it later. I would say that one of the biggest challenges teachers have is just allowing for a classroom to become more student centered—shifting the culture so that students feel like they can be knowers and sense-makers and that the teachers trust them to get there. I'll get to that more in a minute. Generally, our teachers have been introducing argumentation as a way that scientists and engineers come to understand the world together or make decisions together. I think most of them focus on argumentation more as discussions that help with these processes and don't focus on the term argumentation so much. Within this idea of sense-making (e.g., explaining phenomena) and decision-making (e.g., the best way to conduct an investigation or solve a problem), the teachers makes clear to their students that there will often be disagreements and that this is normal and useful—that when we all share our thinking and evidence for that thinking, we all learn, especially when some of the new evidence changes our thinking. This being said, many of our teachers are still considering whether it's more productive to have students disagree with each other or with ideas. I think this is a great place for them to be because it means they're thinking about the essence of why they are having students engage in this practice. Allowing more open-ended discussions to happen in a classroom requires dramatic shifts in student and teacher expectations. Students may be uncomfortable sharing ideas until they think they are the "correct" idea for a variety of reasons. They may need to work on listening skills that require critical thinking, which goes beyond parroting back information. And teachers need to have approaches to support students in building this comfort and the skills to participate in discussions. For teachers this means a lot of letting go, but it also means finding the right balance of letting go and maintaining control of the direction of a discussion to keep it productive. Teachers spend a lot of time in the first year of this type of work figuring out where it's okay to step back and where to insert themselves. They learn skills for scaffolding student participation, e.g., some use of sentence frames and productive questions (can you say more about that? what do other people think of that idea? what is your evidence? does anyone want to build on that?). They also learn skills to develop good questions for productive discussions and argumentation because not all questions lend themselves to discussion. Additionally, they spend time considering the timing of these discussions, e.g., what do I want my students to get out of this unit? What are the big ideas they're trying to figure out? When will discussion be productive? What will the specific goal of my discussion be? I would love to discuss all of these ideas further.

Your second question (how are you measuring (or planning to measure) gains in students' argumentation skill? Related to part two, what does successful argumentation look like at for elementary students?) is a little easier to answer. We are primarily using an instrument that focuses on teacher and student practices in whole class discussions, called the Science Discourse Instrument (SDI). The SDI was developed by the Stanford portion of our 3-way collaboration for a previous project. We have a publication on it, and we can share that reference below. Coralie and Emily Reigh may add more than what I will include here, but the basic gist is that this instrument measures 3 teacher and 3 student practices. The teacher practices are:

-ASK (asking open-ended questions that have more than one possible response—at least as far as the student audience is concerned—and require discussion)

-PRESS (In productive science discussions, students make their ideas clear and support them with evidence and reasoning. Teachers can support students by pressing them to clarify, elaborate, build on, provide evidence for, or explain the reasoning behind their statements.)

-LINK (In productive science discussions, students link their ideas to previous contributions. Toward this end, teachers can provide opportunities for students to compare, contrast, and critique different ideas that arise. In addition, teachers can highlight interesting or relevant ideas and synthesize different ideas with the goal of bringing the discussion to resolution.)

 

The student practices are: 

-EXPLAIN/CLAIM (Productive science discussions encourage students to move from discussion based on observations to discussion involving ideas, explanations, and claims supported by evidence.)

-CO-CONSTRUCT (Productive science discussions involve students building on each other’s ideas and asking each other questions that clarify, elaborate, or extend what has been said.)

-CRITIQUE (Productive science discussion involves students critically examining the ideas that are shared. Students may either express disagreement or ask questions that challenge one another’s ideas. When students critique one another’s ideas, they should make clear connections between ideas and use evidence and reasoning.)

Our Stanford research team is using this instrument (which includes a rating scale and more nuanced descriptions for each practice) to evaluate changes in teachers' classrooms over time. They video three times in the fall and three times in the spring each year of the project, as well as collect baseline video from teachers before they begin any of the professional learning activities. For students we can only see change within a year because we do not follow the students from classroom to classroom. We are looking at some additional measures as well, such as portions of the embedded assessment system within the school district's adopted science curriculum—items that require argumentation skills. 

As far as what "successful" argumentation looks like at the elementary/upper elementary level, this is defined by NGSS. There are specific bullets that are part of the description of the practice of engaging in argument from evidence for the 3-5 grade band. So, ideally you will see these things happening in a classroom. However, we are more concerned with change in student skills than mastery. Are students getting better at it? The goal is really for teachers to meet their students where they are at the beginning of the year and help them improve throughout the year. Simultaneously, this means the teachers have a lot of shifting to do in their practice to support this. 

I hope I've helped to address some of your questions. 

 

Best,

 

Emily

Hi IPT, 

 

I'm excited to see your work unfold and I'm eager to learn more about your work with district leadership. I'm wondering what strategies you used to initially engage with district-level administrators and what work you did to maintain that engagement over time? 

What a great project. I love the focus of argumentation and the collaboration between Higher Ed institutions and the teacher leadership network within the district. Congratulations! Joanna

Thank you for sharing this wonderful project! This academic year, I worked on an education research project involving curriculum development for elementary and middle school students and find this topic very exciting. How do you envision the results from this study will impact future design of a model that can be applied nationally to build school district level capacity?

Hello Emily and all,

Since you have a long-term partnership to address improvement in these schools while conducting research, I am curious about your next collaboration with all of these partners. What is your process for determining what areas may be the best to tackle together?

Catherine

Hi Catherine,

Thank you for this very interesting question. The processes that we put in place help identify challenges and to tackle them collaboratively at different levels.

Here are two examples:

1. Teachers' professional learning and students' needs: Throughout the year, the professional learning team from the Hall organizes 4-6 follow up days to facilitate activities that support teachers in implementing argumentation. Among other activities, they use a protocol to reflect on teachers' and students' practices using classroom videos of themselves. During the follow up days, the research team is observing if the professional learning team is meeting their goals and makes notes of observations that would be interesting to share with the professional learning team. The science teacher on special assignment is participating in the professional learning in the role of a teacher leader and makes observations about whether/how the activities support the teachers' needs. Around end of a follow up day, the Evaluation team surveys the teachers to identify in which areas they still need support. After each follow up day, the science teacher on special assignment, members of the research and evaluation teams, and the professional learning team meet to debrief each day to determine areas to tackle with the teachers in the next follow up day, and to design activities to achieve that.
2. District administrators' needs: I am also meeting almost every week with the district's science teacher on special assignment. She is keeping me updated about what's happening in their institution, and we discuss about whether the partnership is supporting their needs. These 30-minute to 1-hour interviews allow us to identify issues that the project's leadership team needs to address in their bimonthly meetings. These bimonthly meetings include at least one district administrator. The weekly interviews also allow us to collect data about whether and how the partnership is supporting the teachers and the administrators.

We also use other processes, some of them are described by Emily in this thread, as a response to Patrick's question about how to engage district administrators.

If you are interested in a particular type of process, I would be happy to share more about what we do and how it allows us to collaborate in identifying, then tackling challenges together.

Coralie

Thank you, Coralie, If I am understanding your response, this sounds like a great process for identifying challenges related to the CURRENT research and professional development around scientific argumentation. I suppose I am wondering how you will decide what the NEXT topic for research and system improvement will be--after this project is over, and as long as you are expecting to continue to engage with these same partners.

Wonderful sharing and discussions for this video/ project.  I'm so impressed with the quality of professional learning represented in this video and overall project.  We all can learn from the design and the content of "Improving Practice Together" (IPT) 

I wondered if those involved in the project could share some key learnings from your involvement.  Any "word to the wise" you could share from things you may do different next time. 

Thanks, 

DeLene Hoffner

I meant to comment earlier on your response to a question about measurement and listed 6 "moves" - 3 each for teacher and students - that you would look for and score. I think you picked some good ones. Improving discussions, either by begin a better facilitator or having students with a better set of skills, is hard (so many factors that can with enhance or deep six a discussion) so if there's a core set to start with and these become ingrained, that's a terrific base on which to build. Of course this brand of argumentation is a key science practice but the discourse skills are useful more broadly. 

I look forward to reading about your work as it matures.

Sally