I am wondering what this digital clip will be used for.  It does illustrate the some level of the depth of understanding the students have developed.  They spoke with academic language and much accountable talk and discussions.

I would love for there to be online professional learning to be offered.  My teachers have been asking for it.  They would like to implement this curriculum in September in grades 6-8.

I would predict high engagement and deeper understandings with retention of learning.  This has not been the case with our current curriculum and instructional practices.

Kimberly, thanks for your feedback. As we designed the materials, we paid careful attention to scaffolding student engagement with science practices - particularly argumentation from evidence and modeling. I think this shows in the video. The teachers used different moves to keep the students engaged in these discussions. This is where the PD and embedded educative supports were especially useful to teachers. The PD experience is being offered by BSCS, and the teacher guide (which is free) includes many educative features too. Visit the BSCS A Medical Mystery webpage to learn more about the PD offerings.

Hi Kimberly - I'll add on to what Lindsey said to mention that the BSCS PD offering is fully online. It's our hope to make supports for teachers to use the materials as widely accessible as possible.

Thanks, Joni. The students were deeply engaged and wanted to hear all about M'Kenna and how she was doing. It was gratifying to see students engaging in scientific argumentation.

That's a great question, Sonia! Teachers found the PD to be highly valuable. It was adapted from a video-based analysis of practice PD that we've been studying at BSCS for some time. Teacher PD was 7 weeks in the summer and another 4 weeks in the fall as they taught A Medical Mystery. All of the PD was online. In the summer, we met through video conference once per week for 2 hours and teachers completed activities in between to prepare for each week's call. In the fall, teachers filmed themselves teaching the unit and we met for two hours to discuss one or two teachers' videos.

I think teachers found the PD to be so valuable because we really pushed teachers to reflect on what their students were thinking and the coherence of their instructional practice. When teachers put those two things together, with video of classrooms to see evidence of what is possible and to dig deeply into what students are doing and saying, they come away with concrete strategies to help their students learn more and go farther. Teachers love that feeling of empowerment.

First, great video and great project. I'm always impressed with what BSCS puts out so no surprise. Like Sonia, I'm struck by the amount of professional development time. We've always resisted programming PD that is this long and involved but seems like you've been successful and I'm sure it's at the heart of the success in the classroom. Were there incentives for teachers and support from schools/districts? (Not saying the experience isn't compelling all on its own, but curious about the entire structure that makes this possible for them.) 

Great question, Leigh, and thank you for your kind words! The PD was a total of 43 hours spread out across the summer and fall, with 22 hours of video-conferences and the rest asynchronous work for teachers between the 2-hour synchronous sessions.  Because the PD was online, teachers were able to fit it into their busy schedules provided they could attend the 2-hour meetings each week.

This was a research project, so we did provide participation stipends to teachers for their time and data. Based on comments collected from our external evaluator, we learned that teachers deeply valued the experience. They may have begun the PD with an eye for the stipend, but they stuck with it because they valued the community they were building and valued their learning.

Thanks for your questions! We held video-conferences each week for seven weeks in the summer. Teachers had self-paced work to prepare for each week's video-conference. In the fall, teachers filmed themselves teaching A Medical Mystery, and facilitators selected clips from each teacher to discuss during the video-conferences.

There were two foci in the PD. The first was on NGSS broadly - what are the three dimensions, how do you enact and integrate the three dimensions, and what does it mean for students to become more and more adept at science and engineering practices and crosscutting concepts?

The second focus of the PD was a video-based analysis-of-practice model that we've been studying at BSCS for some time, called STeLLA (Roth and colleagues, 2011). Teachers learn to pay close attention to student thinking and help students develop a clear understanding of a science content storyline throughout the unit.  The STeLLA model and the NGSS are highly complementary, so teachers were able to pull it all together for a rich learning experience.

Hi Beth - yes, our projects have many similarities. I'd love to learn more from your team.

We worked with 30 teachers in this project. By the time they filmed themselves in the fall, they were nervous but excited. They had already spent many hours together practicing watching video from non-participating teachers, and had learned how to push one another in constructive ways.

We documented some strong changes in teacher practice and modest changes in teacher content knowledge. You can see more of the details in the resource, Poster of Research Findings, linked at the top of this page. The results show that teachers were better able to elicit and build on student ideas and create more coherent science instruction for students after completing the PD.

Hi Judi, that's a great question. I think it's incredibly important to make sure that new materials are doing no harm to students from groups traditionally underrepresented in the sciences.  We have done some exploratory analyses looking for differential impact of the curriculum on students based on their demographics. We don't see any interactions - that is, the curriculum supports improved learning for all students. This is true for even for the most difficult types of questions - open-ended questions that require students to integrate all three dimensions of the NGSS in their answers. However, we did not narrow any pre-existing differences.  All groups learned more than they learned in the business-as-usual condition.

Thanks for doing the research and answering the question.  

Below, Kenne asks a question about identity.  I wonder what components might be important to narrowing differences.  It also sounds like you are thinking of new work related to COVID19.  I look forward to seeing where you all go. Such a great project.

Thanks for your feedback and questions! M'Kenna is a real person. She and her family engaged with us as we told her story in the unit. The evidence students worked with was based on M'Kenna's medical records.

While the unit has students primarily figure out M'Kenna's illness, the students bring their own related experiences to the conversation, which is encouraged. The final models that students develop are ones that explain metabolic processes in their own bodies and how body systems interact when they are healthy and sick. These models help the students explain M'Kenna's phenomena, but also their own experiences too. Keeping the work about both M'Kenna and about things that happen to "me" was important to sustain engagement.

The teachers we worked with on the unit reported high engagement from their students. One group of students was so fascinated by M'Kenna's story that they had lingering questions for M'Kenna at the completion of the unit. We arranged for M'Kenna to answer those questions in a follow-up interview. And happy to report that M'Kenna is doing very well!

Thanks for your comment. The medical mystery program is a blend of digital and in-class experiences. When interactives and simulations are used, they are central to the storyline and designed to facilitate student learning. For example, one interactive has students take a virtual trip through M'Kenna's digestive system to see endoscopy images at different locations. The students could have been given the images on paper, but the interactive gives them the perspective of the endoscope camera which is helpful to orient them to where and how the images are captured.

Yes, we've used this same design approach to design a variety of curriculum units, including ones with an environmental and ecosystem focus. The Medical Mystery unit is unique in that it's designed to support 1-to-1 classrooms, as well as more traditional classrooms. Not all of our programs are designed for 1-to-1 learning like a Medical Mystery, but the underlying design process is the same.

Thanks for the reply. Really like that learners are asked to explain things. Theoriies and explanations are at the heart of scientific reasoning. And I'd love to know more about the assessment. I hope you'll be saying more about it in a future publication. Again thanks.

Hi Michael. Thanks for the comment. Yes! There is a connection between the projects. OpenSciEd based their Metabolic Reaction unit on A Medical Mystery. Several of us designers wrote on both units, so there is a great deal of overlap. The storyline unfolds differently because the Performance Expectations are not an exact match between the two versions of the unit, but the models and explanations students work toward are very similar. And, of course, it's the same M'Kenna!

Good to hear from you, Mark! The team did a fantastic job on the video. Definitely a resource we are proud to share with everyone.

Hi Kenne, Thanks for your comment! You raise a really interesting idea. We have not yet investigated students' identity development as part of this work, but I agree there is a possibility that the unit could be supporting this. I'd add that there are two kinds of identity development that could be occurring-- one about how students identify as medical professionals/scientists, and a 2nd possibility related to their own identity as advocates for their personal/family health. Thanks for the feedback and raising an interesting question for us to consider.

Hi Marianne, thank you for your kind words. The OpenSciEd unit, Metabolic Reactions, was based on our work in A Medical Mystery. They begin in similar ways, but ultimately address different performance expectations. The main focus of A Medical Mystery is on the interaction of body systems. The main focus of the OpenSciEd unit is metabolic reactions, including attending in greater detail to the physical science standards related to chemical reactions.

Teachers spent approximately 3 hours in asynchronous work and 2 hours in synchronous work each week in the summer. The asynchronous work required teachers to read about pedagogical strategies showcased in the teacher edition, engage as learners in the science content, and analyze classroom video that integrates the pedagogical strategies in the context of the curriculum materials. The synchronous (video-conference) sessions pulled forward teachers' ideas from the asynchronous work  for deeper discussion.

Thanks for your question, Jennifer! Oregon Public Broadcasting works with BSCS Science Learning to design media elements for the course materials.

For A Medical Mystery, we filmed a subset of teachers teaching the course to their students and these videos along with transcripts are used for the PD and are available on the A Medical Mystery website as part of the online professional learning course. We also developed the interactive learning experiences, the animations and illustrations.

What an awesome pairing! Thanks for the info. :)

Thank you, Sunni.

Hi Marcia, I think your question about the use of technology is more about what platform is used to distribute and manage the course rather than the media components. Correct?

BSCS developed a set of additional supports for teachers that includes tips for reframing the resource for online instruction during COVID-19. As far as how teachers are using the materials, my colleagues at BSCS will comment shortly.

Hi Marcia. While the materials are offered to students and teachers digitally (think 1-to-1 classrooms), so much of the learning in the unit occurs through face-to-face collaborative sensemaking activities. For example, the modeling work in the unit requires students to develop their own models, compare their models to their peers' models, and to argue from evidence as the class works toward consensus models. The unit was designed to do this part of the work assuming in-class, face-to-face instruction. We've been working with teachers familiar with the unit to provide additional guidance for how to recreate some of those collaborative sensemaking experiences in an online format using additional digital tools. The fact that the materials are offered digitally gives us a bit of a leg up, but we are still trying to figure out how to recreate (to some degree) the rich discussions, driving question board, modeling and argumentation work, (among other things) in an online space. 

Hi Marcia - that's an excellent question. I'll build on to what Lindsey said. A Medical Mystery is a digital curriculum designed for face-to-face classrooms. That said, it is uniquely positioned as a digital curriculum for teachers to use in this time of online instruction. Several of our field test teachers have attempted to use it as such. There are elements that are fairly easy to implement, such as opportunities for students to share their initial ideas. Teachers are using a variety of approaches to handle this component (Google Classroom is one). Students can also engage with interactive learning experiences and animations on their own - but these resources tend to require small group and whole class discussions to help students get the most learning out of the media. It is the small group and whole class discussions that are most challenging. Some teachers host whole class video conferences, others are using whole class document discussions (e.g., shared Google Doc).

The teachers who have shared their experiences with us tell us that their efforts are moderately successful. It is certainly not as effective as face-to-face instruction, but is better than much of what passes for online science instruction these days.

Obviously COVID has many of us thinking about remote learning! The challenges you note are temporary, I think. Possibilities are opening up!

As you note, you have a "leg up" given that you have teachers vested in the program, trained, and used to facilitating conversations. Similarly, as a society we've all been given a boost (shove, really) toward embracing technology. As we continue to master "the basics" of online functioning, everyone's attention WILL be able to shift challenging/extending the technologies to work with slightly different audiences or for different purposes. As one example, Zoom can be used as a single meeting area or can include breakout rooms of different student groups working...the teacher pops in and out of just like would be done in a real classroom. Such an approach allows students to verbally communicate and share one student's screen (either program materials or their notes as assigned notetaker....on google docs, a spreadsheet program or word processing program, an art app or a notability note) or all view a shared google doc where they are documenting their discussion.

(There are MAJOR equity and other issues to all of this, but I think more of society now recognizes those, so I'm hopeful those too will change more rapidly than we could have ever hoped.)

You make some excellent points, Mari. I think with time, online instruction will definitely improve as teachers and PD facilitators learn more about matching specific types of interaction with the tools that support those interactions.

Thanks, Karletta! BSCS does most of the recruitment. Some is done through their vast listserv (with a focus on subject and middle school interest), but some recruitment is done via hands on research. We reach out through emails and calls to teachers and students from high-needs areas around the country. For the PD videos that OPB filmed, we worked with teachers in Sacramento, CA, Chattanooga, TN, Ramsey, NJ, and Kirkland, WA. For the teachers who participated in the PD and filmed in their own classrooms, we have representation across the country. 

Thank you, Alison, for your questions. When this project first began, there was a need for high quality instructional materials that created instructional environments that promote teaching and learning at the nexus of the three dimensions of the NGSS. And this need still exists today although there are programs emerging that address this need. We set out to create both curriculum and PD as essential leverage points for facilitating change within middle school classrooms. We also knew that a curriculum that was online and and featured interactive and engaging digital supports for students to understand the complex interactions of body systems was the way to go.

BSCS has studied the STeLLA PD program for several years and we also saw the need to bring this type of PD to middle school teachers and to test the traditional face to face PD in a more affordable online delivery format. We set out to test the combination of high quality instructional materials designed for NGSS with support of an effective PD framework in order to support teachers in bringing the three dimensional teaching and learning described by NGSS and the Framework.

Great to hear from you, Elizabeth! I, too, wish the curriculum matched your state standards.

Thanks, Elizabeth!

Thanks for your question, Christopher. You can share the link to this video through this site indefinitely (https://videohall.com/p/1674). The video is also available on our BSCS web site (https://bscs.org/amedicalmystery). Finally, longer videos (dozens of them) are available in the free teacher's edition of the course. Teachers need only visit bscs.org/amedicalmystery to sign up for a free registration code for the TE.

Great! Thanks!