Hi Iliya: Teachers were encouraged to share the ideas, PD resources, and curriculum modifications with other teachers in their networks / buildings. We haven’t use a formal social media platform to support that sharing — although PD and curriculum resources are accessible through a wiki. Not surprisingly, 85% of the sharing happens within teacher’s buildings — which fits the literature. But this year we did have ~10% who engaged in whole building PD using project materials.

Hi Brian: That is an excellent point. We are learning about how we need to shift and engage in research in response to the emergent issues coming up in the fields of practice. The social network analysis is actually driven equally by interests within the district (to document the broader influence of PD resources beyond the teachers immediately involved) as well as by the interests of the researchers. So the research team is prioritizing that work in order to make good use of the info at the district level. We have also been focusing our R&D work substantially on emergent problems of practice that come up within the classrooms (e.g., around pedagogical aspects of engaging youth in engineering design, how to more deeply engage students in argumentation / explanation). On the PD design side of things, the research team has had to also engage in work to support returning teachers in deeper and deeper learning about specific practices across multiple years. There are plenty of knew research topics and methods to sink into. ;-)

Thank you, Barbara. We are planning just this sort of thing. And this spring we captured some classroom teaching around specific techniques associated with the focus of the project that will be posted publicly—which includes getting the teacher’s perspective as well. And we have more of that planned in the near future.

Hi Barbara, You are so right! As you know there are many, many cooks in the kitchen.

Hi Tony: As you question implies, the underlying vision in the NRC Framework for K-12 Science Education makes a clear research-based argument that all science learning is a cultural accomplishment and that it is very powerful to instructionally build on learners’ prior interest and identity (see Chapter 11 for details). These ideas are integrated into our professional development and collaborative work with teachers — especially during the curriculum adaptation work (where we focus on relating the practice-focused enhancements on the interests of youth and communities to the degree possible). Beyond that, there are different instructional techniques that teachers can use to work towards these cultural / equity goals. Another that we have used quite successfully prompts students to self-document (in pictures or short videos) how the science subject matter relates to their personal lives / interests and then ask students to conduct research in those directions. Taking up a cultural frame is relatively tricky, so we have ongoing discussions about what it does / does not mean (in terms of the design research literature). We also have some teachers who serve large numbers of culturally and linguistically diverse students. In those spaces we work with them to put in instructional supports for emerging English Learners. Chapter 11 has some relevant ideas around relating youth discourse to scientific discourse, and Appendix D of the NGSS points to specific research-based strategies to explore for science ed. This focus on ELL supports and capacity building in relation to practice-focused instruction is an area that the partners in our effort wanted to sink into —so we will be sinking into more specific work in that direction for the next three years. Stay tuned. Thanks for the question.

We’ve used a combination of surveys to generate social networks and qualitative case studies at the classroom and school level.

Spending a lot of time in the field in collaboration with partners within the school systems provides wonderful views into the emerging capacity… but that’s far from “measurement.”