Learning While Teaching: Bringing Together Professional Learning and NGSS-Aligned Instructional Materials Enactment

There is a significant and stubborn challenge before this country in improving science teaching and learning. While we have two visionary and clear documents - the National Research Council’s Framework of K-12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) – the changes called for in these documents have been slow to find their way into classrooms. This pace of change is understandable as identified changes in science teaching and learning in this vision are big and complex. They do raise new challenges for teachers, schools and districts. At the same time, the call to strengthen science education in the United States remains, as it should. Simply put, teacher learning about the day to day enactment of NGSS in the classroom will remain a significant problem and progress in changing how science is taught in this country will not improve until new models of professional learning are designed to support teachers where they do their work, in classrooms with their students. The proposed Learning While Teaching project is a research-based designed response to the challenges of scaling-up K-12 teachers’ capacity and confidence with three-dimensional teaching and learning and the kindred challenge of addressing serious shortcomings in current models of professional learning. The corpus of work outlined in this proposal will result in a new and much needed model of professional learning for K-12 teachers. A primary outcome of doing so will be to close what is a historic gap between teachers learning at a distance from their classroom. Learning While Teaching places teachers proximate to and builds on their classroom experiences with their students. They will learn about and use instructional materials along with tools and resources that are educative. Through these experiences they will be building capacity and confidence to make changes in their practice, and in their understanding of how students engage in progressive knowledge building about the natural world. Because the Learning While Teaching model will be piloted twice during the proposed 20-month project, there will be a repeated opportunity to gather and analyze data on the work of two study groups at two different points in time. We will learn from these pilots, integrate those learnings into the second phase of piloting and develop conference papers to share the results of the work.