Professional Development

This article describes online video coaching model used with middle-grades, rural mathematics teachers.

Carson, C., Callard, C., Gillespie, R., Choppin, J., & Amador, J. (2019). Bridging the distance: One-on-one video coaching supports rural teachers. The Learning Professional, 40(6), 66-70.

We describe an experience within mathematics teacher preparation that engages pre-service teachers of mathematics (PMTs) in Making and design practices that we hypothesized would inform their conceptual, curricular, and pedagogical thinking. With a focus on the design of new tools that can generate new possibilities for mathematics teaching and learning, this Learning by Design experience has PMTs exploring at the intersection of content, pedagogy, and Making.

From 2012–2015, Advanced Placement (AP) science courses underwent a large-scale curricular reform to include more scientific inquiry and reasoning, reduce emphasis on broad content coverage, and focus on depth of understanding, with corresponding changes in high-stakes AP examinations. In this study, we explored how teachers prepared for and adapted to this reform over a three-year period. Data included four waves of individual interviews with 22 AP Biology and Chemistry teachers across the United States. Data were qualitatively analyzed using emic and etic coding.

Teachers' use of formative assessment (FA) has been shown to improve student outcomes; however, teachers enact FA in many ways. We examined classroom videos of nine experienced teachers of elementary, middle, and high school science, aiming to create a model of FA enactment that is useful to teachers.

K-12 introductory programming experiences are often highly scaffolded, and it can be challenging for teachers and learners to transition from these scaffolded experiences to experiences of learner-directed creative work, where learners are solving problems and fluently expressing ideas through code. Learners can often "get stuck" in this creative process due to a number of different factors: (1) imagination, (2) concepts, (3) bugs, (4) doubt, and (5) pedagogy.

We report on one teachers’ efforts to re-design an entire instructional unit as a coherent storyline about forces and motion as a part of a multiyear professional development (PD) project around the NGSS. Designing coherent storylines demands that teachers create opportunities for students to meaningfully engage in science practices in order to develop their knowledge over time.

Jaber, L. Z., Hufnagel, E., & Radoff, J. (2019). “This is Really Frying My Brain!”: How Affect Supports Inquiry in an Online Learning Environment. Research in Science Education.

The role of probability in curricula for children has fluctuated greatly over the past several decades. Recently, some countries have removed probability from their preschool and primary curricula, and others have retained it. One reason for such lack of agreement is that theory about early probability learning is still relatively new and under development. The purpose of this report is to sketch a tentative theoretical structure with the potential to anchor curricular decisions and inform further research on early probability learning.

As engineering learning experiences increasingly begin in elementary school, elementary teacher preparation programs are an important site for the study of teacher development in engineering education. In this article, we argue that the stances that novice teachers adopt toward engineering learning and knowledge are consequential for the opportunities they create for students.

We report on the use of bilingual constructed response science assessments in the context of a research and development partnership with secondary school science teachers. Given the power that assessments have in today’s education systems, our project provided a series of workshops for teachers where they explored students’ emergent reform-oriented science meaning-making in our project-designed assessments.