Brian,

Am impressed to learn about the project and believe it has greater potential beyond the US. As an educator, I see lost opportunities for learners to be like scientists - by developing a culture of inquiry and curiosity. This is often due to limitations in allowing learners to ask questions, and engaging questions which trigger ask and re-ask_search and re-search.

I'll explore the materials in your project with a view to contextualizing the approach in the Kenyan context.

Thanks for the amazing project

I'm also curious about the storyline aspect. I looked at the definition of a storyline on your website and was curious what the end product looks like? How do students shape, or what do they produce to indicate they've developed a full "storyline" or integrated mental model of a concept after doing their explorations through the sequence of lesson plans?

I'm going to do my best to answer both your questions in one post so forgive the length!

Gillian - I love that you are bringing up this complex relationship between stories and evidence. Because this is a science classroom evidence-based argumentation is key to successfully constructing scientifically accurate mechanistic models. Every step of the way, students are playing a critical role in the purposeful sensemaking occurring in their classroom so they are conducting investigations, analyzing and making sense of evidence, and constructing arguments from that evidence. The curricular materials also have tools and pedagogical structures to scaffold this for students. For example, if students are designing and conducting an investigation their worksheet might have 3 sections: What we did, What we saw, What it means. This structure pushes students to anchor their claims in what they saw. In addition to using science practices (which by definition mandate evidence based reasonings), teachers are also creating classroom norms where all claims must be supported by evidence in order to become a part of our communal explanation. Teachers often do this explicitly while using talk moves to help elucidate student reasoning and push them to support all of their claims with evidence. So, to go back to your original question, we are definitely capitalizing on the natural human impulse to tell stories, in particular stories that are coherent from the students' perspective, but we are telling a very specific TYPE of story - a scientific story where we use science practices in meaningful ways to build the story that will explain our puzzling phenomena!

Carrie - you can actually see what we call a storyline skeleton (I linked to a MS Sound unit) on our website that I think you'll find useful in understanding our teams' conceptualization of a storyline! Part of the co-construction of knowledge in the science classroom depends on teachers pushing students to continue to dig deeper (often by doing something we call problematizing) until they reach a mutually satisfactory explanation of the anchoring phenomena. But along the way, the class will build many models constantly revising their explanation as they collect new evidence. One way we scaffold the development of what you are calling an "integrated mental model of a concept" is by having the class fill out a model tracker at the end of every lesson where they keep a record of what they have figured out so far. Students are asked to record the question they were trying to answer that lesson, what they did that day, and what they figured out to help them answer that question. The class then talks about what new questions they now have and where they could go next. This gives students a concise way of tracking the development of their knowledge and seeing how their understanding grows in complexity over time and keep track of all of the pieces of their explanation. By the end of the storyline the goal is that students feel that they are able to answer most, if not all, of the questions they've developed over the lessons and feel confident about their class consensus model. Often times this is done by making a final, summative model. These are student developed, public models that must hold up under critique from their peers!

Thank you! Seeing the storyline skeleton, paired with your explanation was very helpful in understanding what it looks like in application.

I'd also suggest a visit to Next Gen Science Storylines Twitter page. (You may have to scroll past the more recent links about the Video Showcase to find tweets from teachers about our chicken unit.) A number of teachers who use storylines materials are excited to share what they and their students are figuring out throughout a unit. So, you can find a number of photos, videos, and reflections from teachers about their experiences to get a sense of the range of ways that teachers are taking up (and transforming) this work!

All great questions Shelia! I will start to answer your questions and let my other team members jump in with any additional information to fill in the gaps.

Our storylines always begin with a phenomenon introduced by the teacher. These phenomena have been selected, tested, and modified by teachers and researchers based on observations and feedback of the students. It's crucial for our project to choose opening phenomena that provoke not only interest, but also a variety of questions to be explored. While the student questions do begin to form during the opening phenomenon exploration activity- those questions are reformed and refined by the students as they engage in large and small group discussions on related phenomena from personal experiences. The magic happens when the whole class comes together to try to put together any already known pieces of puzzle to explain the mechanism behind the phenomenon in a class consensus model. During this process students realize they may not have as much knowledge as they had originally assumed when their ideas are challenged and questioned by other students. This then leads to an activity we call the Driving Question Board where students write down, share, and make their questions public in the classroom. The Driving Question Board activity happens after the students have had a chance to think and collaborate with the teacher and the other students, and that's the work that has to be done to agree on which questions are "worth" investigating as a class.

Finding the right balance between having the student vs. the teacher lead the direction of the lesson within a timeframe is a difficult task! Strategies we've seen our teachers have success with include being transparent with the students about the work being a shared mission. One student may have an interesting idea to explore, but if the idea is not brought up and agreed on by the classroom community as a whole it might not be taken up inside of class time. If the idea is taken up the class and the students can convince each other that the corresponding investigation will continue their progress on the shared driving question/s then we encourage deviation from the storyline! The key is to have students bought in to the overall mission from the start.

To add on to what Kelsey said, I think your point about balance between student driven work and the fact that there are also specific disciplinary core ideas we want students to master is an important one. I'm really glad you brought this up!

Sikorski and Hammer (2017) brought up this point as well. Our team wrote about how we toe this line by thinking of purposeful sense making in the science classroom as a co-construction. Students are building the knowledge but the teacher is guiding students down productive pathways to ensure that the class gets to the appropriate science content in a timely manner. You can read our paper here - it goes into a lot more detail about what we do from a design perspective to navigate this challenge!

What are your thoughts on our approach?

Thank you for the replies, and for the references. I will definitely check those out.

Best, Sheila

Brian - I'm going to try and take a stab at this one! In some ways we moved ahead at all ages simultaneously but really the root of our teams' work is in MS classrooms. We then moved into K-5 and HS classrooms in parallel!

You are absolutely correct that different grade bands have their own unique challenges. We have definitely seen that this type of learning is more aligned with current elementary classrooms and that it is (often) a much more drastic shift for HS teachers than for elementary teachers. Simultaneously, we often times see elementary students take on their new offered roles with much less resistance than HS students, who can sometimes resent the shift in responsibility. But elementary classrooms also have unique challenges! Elementary teachers do not always have the deep disciplinary background that allows them to feel comfortable guiding students in developing models. There are also structural challenges since often times elementary schools do not have a daily time set aside for science and so teachers have to work hard to ensure that the storyline stays relevant to their students. So I think there are just challenges all around!

Aliza, 

   THanks for these comments.  I defintely have seen that, maybe because the stakes are higher in high school, teachers are more concerned that their students succeed, and so "new" methods are seen as risky.  My informal opinion, based on a lot of years of work with HS curriculum and HS teachers, is that teachers that have had some solid experience in doing research tend to be more trusting that a question-driven approach such as you are exploring.  This means that giving HS science teachers opporuntiies to conduct research, and reflect on the learning that took place (conceptual as well as procedural and "NOS") is a powerful experience to encourage pedagogical shifts in the HS.  My 2¢

Brian - I think your insights are spot on. Thank you so much for adding them to the conversation. If you look at Trey's comments about how we structure PD and then have virtual study groups in order to have an extended PLC, we are trying to support the second half of what you are talking about: reflection. And I think in some ways we are getting at the first part, research, because we are involving teachers in our research. But I think your insight about giving HS teachers an opportunity to conduct pedagogical research is a really critical one. Giving teachers the agency to ask their own questions and explore for themselves what this approach might afford their students is a truly powerful way to get more teacher buy in, particularly at the HS level. I have two follow up questions though:

1) How do you provide teachers with the support so that they have the time to conduct research? Teachers are already asked to do so much! I feel like the challenge here is not getting teachers to want to do research but to find the time! Do you agree?

2) How do you support teachers conducting research on student learning on a large scale? One of the things the academic world struggles with is metrics; meaningful assessment of student learning/work is HARD! How can we support teachers in thinking meaningfully about metrics like this for research purposes when they are already struggling just to develop 3D assessments that truly capture student learning? Or do perhaps these two things go hand in hand?

I would love to hear your thoughts!

I'll also try and see if I can get some of the HS teachers we work with to chime in with their thoughts!

Hi, Aliza, 

  Thanks for your reply.  I agree that the logistics of teacher research are a problem-- this is part of the bigger challenge of improving PD for science teachers-- so that they have time to be learners as well.  Right now, despite lots of rhetoric about how important this is, I think the solutions in the US are mostly on a school-by-school basis.  If the school (whether because of an insightful principal, or because of the teachers' activity) has a culture that takes this seriously, then it can happen (you are probably aware of the "teacher-as-researcher" movement, which provides some insight here).

    But I was actually referring to teachers getting experience doing science research.  Despite some postiive recent trends, an awful lot of students can get degrees in a science without ever having had the experience of actually doing research (where there is some engagement with the questions and the data as well as the techniques) -- and then if they move into teaching (yay!) they don't get a chance thereafter.

       The old analogy still is worth thinking about:  we expect that music teachers can actually play music (or sing, if their instrument is voice), but for some reason we don't expect that science teachers can "science".That's always been unfair — they shoudl have the chance to experience knowledge-making in their field  — but it is more so with the recent emphasis on the Practices.  

 In my experience, when a teacher has the time to do some science — and reflect on their experience as a learner as well as a practitioner — it provides a lot of insight into what they are doing in the classroom -- and what their kids are going through.  

   I have always thought that, intellectually speaking, science teachers have to be "amphibians" — knowledgeable to some degree about learning sciences and pedagogy on the one hand, but on the other knowledgeable about their subject matter as well. And fascinated by both realms.  It's partly why Joseph Schwab wrote about the impossible role of the progressive teacher  (you can see it here if you haven't seen it before). 

Onward!

I was totally thinking "teacher-as-researcher", but should have realized you were talking about "teacher-as-scientist"! Thank you so much for your comments. There's definitely a lot here to think about when trying to support systemic change! Onward is right!

Aliza and Brian,

Related to Brian's point about the importance of preservice teachers having experience with scientific research, this may be an area where the recent work on "course based research experiences" (CURE's) may be a useful resource. There have been a couple of recent publications from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine on this subject, and my sense is that the number of undergraduate programs incorporating CURE's into courses within a science curriculum is gradually increasing.

Thank you, Brian and Aliza, for this lively discussion about supporting teachers in "giving up control" in the classroom.  I laughed out loud when I visualized teachers as (intellectual) amphibians! :)  In the Making Sense of SCIENCE project, we have found that when teachers have the opportunity to engage in science investigations that emphasize collaborative sense-making as adult learners, they no longer feel that they have to "know everything" in order to teach science.  And, in videos of their classroom practice, we have seen them provide more opportunities for student-centered scientific sense-making, when compared to teachers who have not experienced this kind of PL.  Those practices, in turn, were correlated with higher student learning outcomes (Little, 2019--follow up with me about forthcoming publications about this from our RCT.  I'm very excited about it).  The activities involved in that study were perhaps more limited in scope than the science research that Brian & Matt may be referring to, but I think it's interesting that these 5-day courses for teachers have the potential to shift teachers' thinking about their roles as facilitators of learning AND their classroom practice.

Hi, Erin! This is a really important question—and it's one that we're still exploring quite a bit. While we have a couple of different PD formats depending on the project or partnership, one format we have had quite a bit of success with involves first bringing teachers together for intensive, out-of-school sessions where they can experience the unit as student learners (with a figurative "student hat" on) and also reflect on these experiences and the artifacts from other teachers' classrooms as teacher learners (with a "teacher hat" on). Then, when teachers return to their schools and begin teaching the unit, we've found that teachers benefit from meeting every other week or so in virtual meetings. These meetings provide opportunities for teachers to look back at lessons they've done with students so far (which involves sharing successes and challenges and getting feedback from peers who are also teaching the unit) and for teachers to look forward at upcoming lessons (to think about and plan for key ideas, tasks, and strategies they will need). This paper describes some of the features of the hybrid design I've described. We find that the hybrid model, among other things, provides a core set of experiences that teachers can draw on when they go back to their classrooms while also providing follow-up support so that teachers can share ideas for how they've modified routines or lessons to fit their contexts or be reminded by peers of some strategies (or parts of strategies) they might have forgotten about (or that wasn't clear) from the initial PD.

Thankfully, our team includes teachers who co-design and refine early versions of units. These same teachers and those who partner with us to teach more refined versions of these units are generous enough to open up their classrooms for us to visit and collect videos, artifacts, surveys. Some of these teachers also become facilitators of professional learning for other teachers. Having teachers as central members of the team throughout this process allows us to integrate into professional development examples of what teaching a storylines unit might look like with students.

Rachel - Thank you so much for bringing up how the shifts in different grade bands might look different. If you look at my response to Brian (above) I was trying to at least start to describe how, anecdotally, we have noticed that the challenges in supporting this shift can be different at different grade bands. I think our team, and the research community at large, has a lot more work to do in characterizing what these shifts might look like and how to support them at all, let alone at different grade bands. I'm writing my dissertation on this actually - so I'm still going through the data! Does your work touch on this at all? I would love to hear your thoughts!

But I think you bring up another interesting point - interdisciplinary work. I think, from a theoretical perspective, storylines provide some truly awesome interdisciplinary opportunities that all teacher, not just elementary teachers, can capitalize on. Even if you are not responsible for instruction in multiple subjects you can collaborate with other teachers or just take a risk and bring in literacy, history, social justice and other perspectives into the science classroom. The real world is never as siloed as subjects are in school and complex phenomena are a perfect on ramp for this type of thinking!

Trey and I were just talking about this so I'm going to ask him to jump in with his thoughts because I think he can talk about this much more eloquently than I can!

Hi, Matt! In responding to Patrick below, I think I began to touch on your questions as well, particularly around providing teachers with tools and practice related to productive talk. We've been so fortunate to work with Michaels and O'Connor and their Talk Science Primer in iterations of the professional development design. Listening to one another, expanding or clarifying one's own thinking, providing evidence and reasoning, and comparing one's ideas with others' are all central aspects of productive talk—and they're central parts of our professional development. I've observed virtual study meetings during the enactment of a unit where teachers return to the talk moves sheet and discuss openly and honestly which of the talk moves they are using successfully and which ones they plan to leverage more. I've observed middle school classrooms where teachers are posting these moves for students to use—and students are using them as they say, "I disagree with James because..." or they're asking a peer to "say more." In terms of the scaffolding changing based on grade level, I personally am less able to speak to that as I spend most of my time looking at and thinking about middle school classrooms. Hopefully someone else on the team can chime in!

No, thank YOU Tamera! You were an absolute pleasure to work with :).

Hi, Patrick! I love hearing about the central role of questions in your classroom. Indeed, questions are so central to a storylines design. And there are a few different ways that teachers might leverage students' questions. It sounds like you and your students had quite a bit of leeway in where you went next. I think Aliza and Kelsey did a fabulous job above of explaining how we work with teachers to embrace students' questions while also hitting target learning goals. I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on what it looks like to do this kind of negotiation.

I think you've also touched on one of the exciting aspects of NGSS: it represents what is often a drastic shift in what teachers (and their students) think science learning should and could look like. I wrote quite a bit above in my response to Erin just now about one of our core PD structures. I want to call out (and expand on) four features that I think are central to your question. First, using video clips and example artifacts from teachers' classrooms—classrooms where teachers taught these units—and using teacher facilitators who have often co-designed and taught the units is really helpful for showing teachers what a model might look like. Second, while it's helpful to reflect on the examples, it's also so important for teachers to experience some of the routines and lessons with a "student hat" on. I can think of a number of instances where teachers picked up on subtle moves a facilitator made or when they said things like, "Oh, now I know what a student probably feels like when I do this." Third, we supplement all of this with routines and tools that form sort of a web of supports and scaffolds for classroom activity. For instance, teachers might work with some of the talk moves and norms outlined in a STEM Teaching Tools brief. Or teachers will unpack each of the five routines throughout different days of the PD. Fourth, facilitators remind teachers that all of these constellations of tools and routines are intended to support the broader shift in activity that we hope to see: students should be engaging in science and engineering practices, which involve taking on agentive roles for deciding what to figure out, why, and how.