Classroom Practice

Despite a growing effort to integrate students’ civic action projects into science and engineering curricula that address climate change and environmental justice, there are few frameworks that guide teachers and students to make well-informed decisions and actions towards a more just and sustainable future. This article presents a tool, Civic Action Matrix, that characterizes different types of students’ civic action projects.

Although there has been increasing attention to the importance of teacher agency in professional development, there has been little attention to what it takes to facilitate collaborative work that both centers teachers’ assets and expertise and leads to productive learning. This paper presents a framework for focused and responsive facilitation of productive discourse around instructional practice in teacher learning communities.

We explored how various contextual resources accumulated over multiple years operated together to facilitate a team of high school teachers' sustained and agentive learning after a 4-year research–practice partnership (RPP) grant concluded. Specifically, we examined constellations of resources that promoted the co-evolution of the teachers' collective inquiry in the professional learning community (PLC) and classroom instruction, focused on supporting students' scientific explanations.

This article presents a tool that teachers can use to support children in planning science investigations. Using an extended example from a second-grade investigation into seed dispersal, we describe strategies for structuring conversations that anchor investigations in phenomena and provide opportunities for students to be involved in making decisions about what materials to use in an investigation, how to use materials, and what to look for or count as evidence.

Seeds of Algebraic Thinking are sub-conceptual resources coming from life experience that students call upon when responding to mathematical prompts. This site includes resources students could activate when thinking about groups and sets, equality, proportionality and ratio reasoning, and functions.

In conversations about pedagogy, researchers often overlook how physical space and movement shape teacher sensemaking. This article offers a comparative case study of classroom videos using a dynamic visual method to map embodied interaction called “interaction geography.” Our analysis proposes an integrative framework to study classroom interactions and teacher movement over space and time comprised of four salient characteristics within lessons: trails, landmarks, material routines, and circulation patterns.

Thoughtful and purposeful displays can support students’ participation in argumentation. This report addresses how displays are used within collective argumentation. We examined a secondary mathematics teacher’s and her students’ use of displays during selected episodes of collective argumentation. From video classroom observations and interviews with the teacher, we extracted several kinds of displays according to their functions and then investigated how these displays supported collective argumentation as direct contributions to the argument or actions supporting the argumentation.

With a decade passing since the release of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), it is timely to reflect and consider the extent to which the promise of science teaching and learning that values and centers learners’ varied epistemologies for scientific sensemaking has been realized. We argue that this potential, in part, lies in the hands of our science education research community becoming aware and intentional with how we situate learners’ language-related resources and practices in our work.

This article explores science teachers’ implementation of science and engineering practices (SEPs) under different instructional settings. We compared the number of SEPs science teachers reported using in face-to-face instruction (traditional), online-only instruction (virtual), or HyFlex instruction (synchronously online and in-person) from August 2020 to May 2021. Records and artefacts of the teachers’ instructional practices were collected over three one-week periods.