I am a great advocate for looking at student work together -- what we each expect from students as 'demonstration of mastery' of a particular standard, concept, or practice is often open to interpretation until each of us has an opportunity to point to it and ask 'do you agree?'. And I have found that such conversations are best achieved when focused on the parts (evidence of a practice or conceptual understanding) and on the whole (putting the pieces together; demonstrating evidence through a variety of means).

Hi again, Jake. Thanks for asking about this! Our formative assessment PLCs including consensus discussions on student work were piloted last year, and that is the snippet you see in the video. We have a 5 minute video where you can see more of the discussion between teachers, and includes that piece you refer to: teachers disagreeing (or agreeing) on whether or not a student response meets the criteria in the rubric and back up what they say by specifically pointing to something in the student work. During one of the sessions last year, one of the teachers kind of had a “meta-moment” where she said “Hey! You are asking us to support our claim about the score we give our students based on the evidence in the student work”! That was really fun. This year, the teachers seem much more comfortable with looking together at the student work; and we have done two “rounds”. Other evidence of their increased comfort is that they are sharing video of their classroom instruction where they are teaching the lesson that gave rise to the student work. We are going to look for differences between the two time points in terms of the consensus process itself (was there more/less convergence?) and looking at the student work scores and how they changed over the year. We just finished round 2 so we have not yet analyzed the data.

I like your other comment about the parts and the whole. Another thing we learned from last year’s pilot is that we often found (especially in the younger grades) that student’s claims surfaced misconceptions, and when that happened—of course it threw the whole thing off. It is not very meaningful to evaluate evidence based on an incorrect claim. In thinking about how to support teachers with this, we decided to shift our focus from the “part” CER as it relates to the SEPs of Arguing from Evidence and Developing Explanations to encouraging (and supporting through PD) the teachers to use Developing and Using Models as a way help students to develop their claims… and indeed all of the rest of it. That practice does address the “whole” as it really brings together many of the SEPs. I think we will see much better student responses by doing this-we shall see.

Thanks for your comment, William. Hopefully my response isn’t too intense! You would think that would be an easy question, but not so much. The teachers who were featured in the video were among a group of approximately 100 teachers per year who participated in some level of support from the 3 year project. In a large district (more than 20,000 teachers) there is a tension between supporting enough teachers to make an impact and supporting them deeply enough to make an impact. Our approach was to offer a nested set of supports that can offer a light touch (24 hours of PD), a medium touch (add to that 12 hours of PLCs) and intensive supports (the above, plus coaching). At the intensive level, our team of four coaches works with 2-3 teachers/school in approximately 24 schools. The teachers whose classrooms were in the video came from this group, and the PD you saw in the video was one of the PLC sessions. We are continuing to work with a smaller group of 35 teachers this year who participate in PLCs only and are coached as well.

Thanks for your comment, Leslie! The positive relationship between student engagement in science classrooms on literacy and mathematics learning is important to emphasize. One recent report by the Education Trust (2017) details how engaging science instruction can be a lever for English Language Learners. Another issue your comment alludes to is the need to figure out what helps to disseminate the knowledge that teacher leaders gain at professional development events to the whole school level. We hope to address this question in future projects that will dissect and characterize the factors that permit and stymie whole-school dissemination.

Thanks Marianne, NGSS implementation does require shifts in thinking for students, teachers and administrators. We are trying to determine how to best support these shifts and what about which supports leads to better outcomes.

Thanks Brian, it is indeed hard work, which requires a long term commitment and many collaborators. We have been supporting Chicago area teachers for approaching 15 years and the teachers supported by three year project described in the video was our share of a collaborative project (called the NGSS Collaborative, supported by Chicago Community Trust and the Big Shoulders Fund) that included the DePaul University STEM Center and the University of Chicago STEMEd center.  These institutions supported additional CPS networks and teachers. Some of the teachers in the Loyola project have been supported through other professional development work we do at our Center for Science and Math Education www.luc.edu/csme, and are continuing to be supported with PLCs and coaching.

                Regarding your question about administrator support, this also occurred at different levels. In the years 1-2 of the project we provided administrator PD sessions two or three times/year on what the NGSS instructional shifts mean in terms of what supports (and resources) teachers need in order to implement these shifts in science classrooms, i.e., what to look for in the science classroom as they do observations, the need for increased instructional time, especially in K-5, the need for adjusting schedules to accommodate this and in-school teacher collaboration, etc etc. In years 2-3 of the project we invited administrators to work with their project teachers on various school planning documents that allowed them to collaboratively articulate and work to implement a science vision for their schools. In the last year of that project and in the schools we are continuing to work with, we help teachers to form school science leadership teams that included the teacher leaders, administrators and instructional coach. This team meets quarterly at the school and utilizes the planning documents as a guidepost for continuing to grow towards whole-school NGSS implementation.

Across 2013-2016, the Loyola project worked with 85 unique administrators representing 57 schools.  This means that about one-half of the schools and teachers engaged in the project had a principal who came to a least one professional development meeting outside of their school.  As Rachel noted, ultimately the project is working to engage teachers and principals to plan and work together at their schools.  In our survey, we asked teachers to report how their school and district administrators supported their using the new NGSS standards. On average teachers agreed firmly that they were getting support from their administrators and their perception of the level of this support stayed roughly level across the project years. 

Hi William, thanks for your question. So, one thing that helps us spread the word about science instruction to elementary teachers is that in Chicago, most elementary schools are K-8. There are very few middle grades-only schools. This is helpful because often the middle grades teachers end up being the ambassadors for this work, and they can bring their K-5 colleagues along for the ride. The middle grades teachers are usually much more confident with their content and are seen as de facto content leaders at their schools anyway. In the three year project we worked with one "teacher leader" from grades 6-8 and one from grades 3-5 in each school. In our 4th year extension of the project we are working directly with one K-2 teacher, one 3-5 teacher and one 6-8 teacher from the schools. I think that by working with a team of teachers, the elementary teachers feel more supported by their peers in their own schools. It is exciting to see them really teaching science instead of avoiding teaching it. 

Some more thoughts on this question is that it helps to have a few brave souls test the waters. The 4th grade teacher in the video is also featured in another longer video where you really see how she supports her students in productive talk/making arguments based on evidence. You can see that video on our home page www.luc.edu/csme. We have utilized that video as an exemplar in our PLCs and it helps the K-5 teachers see that it can indeed be done. This year we have also tried (with varying degrees of success) to have teachers share classroom video with each other, and that has been helpful to build their confidence and practice. And, our formative assessment PLCs really focus them around the student work that comes out of elementary classrooms. Finally, in terms of the relationship with and integration of math and ELA, we like to focus teachers and administrators on the Venn Diagram of practices that has popped up in a variety of places, including http://nstahosted.org/pdfs/ngss/PracticesVennDi...  That is a very good place to start.

Bill, +1 to everything Rachel said. Rachel's point about teachers learning from peers across grade levels works from the bottom up too. 

In preK and K environments, the boundaries between content domains are often very fluid. For many early childhood educators, shifting between and making connections among sci, math, ela, and soc stud is an everyday practice. I've worked on three teacher PD projects recently (one in Chicago and two in SF) that have focussed on bringing NGSS into early elementary grades by extending/continuing existing best practice pedagogies from early childhood classrooms upwards into 1st-3rd grades.

This bottom up approach has had several unexpected benefits: (1) It is enormously empowering for early childhood educators, whose pedagogical skills are often unrecognized by their 1-3 grade peers. (2) It preempts the all-too-common pushback "the kids can't do / aren't ready for it" because the early childhood teachers have already seen the kids do it! (3) The peer-to-peer work among teachers on cross-curricular connections almost inevitably led to conversations about project/problem based inquiry without any further prompting. (4) When implemented effectively, this approach can help ease the K-to-1 transition for students who enjoyed multi-disciplinary, project/problem based learning in pre and k, but then stopped liking school when it became "less fun" in 1st grade.  

(Not surprisingly, science content knowledge and PCK required a lot of external support at all grade levels.)

I’d love to connect and learn more about what you’re doing in LA – perhaps there could be an opportunity to collaborate. Plus, it’s always great to network with fellow NU LS alumni (I think you finished a little bit before I started)! I’ll shoot you an email or drop you a line on LinkedIn :-)

Wonderful question Jake. 

Here is one part of an answer....  and I know Rachel and others can chime in. 

In working to develop, nurture and support science teacher leaders at a large scale, one challenge we have tried to address is the need to actually measure what we mean by leadership in terms of characteristics and behaviors.  It has taken several years of learning through the collaborative expertise of many colleagues and reviewing the literature, but we have a Science Teacher Leader Survey that is helping us explore the process and outcomes of our work.  The survey includes some multi-item scales that show promise in capturing teacher attitudes about (1) their own interest in and abilities to promote science with others outside of their classroom (Advocacy), (2) their openness to doing what needs to happen when working with other teachers through productive sharing and learning with constructive criticism  (Collaboration), and (3) their comfort and strength as science experts (Content).  There are also scales about the types of instructional leadership-aligned conversations and activities in which they engage at school. We hope to continue to validate these scales in future work proposed and to share these as tools that others may find useful.  Additional detail on this work is within our publication NGSS Science Collaborative-Final Report on our website www.luc.edu/csme . 

Jake, I agree the that the term "teacher leader" means many things to many people. In our case we are focused on teachers of science at the K-8 schools we work with, who at the time the project began, were designated to represent their grade band at project activities. Sometimes the principal at the school would ask for volunteers, sometimes it was just by default because they were the only one left who wasn't a "math leader" or "literacy leader", and sometimes we would make a recommendation to the principal because we already knew some of the teachers at their school from other projects we have had. Therefore the teacher leaders who began at year one had a diversity of buy-in, attitudes, content expertise, etc. In years 1 and 2 the project focused on "the teacher as learner" and did not push the leadership focus as we helped teachers get up to speed on the standards and on instructional strategies that they could readily utilize.

In years 2 and 3 we began to infuse content about how to be a science leader--case studies about what that could look like in schools, tools for collaborative planning and meetings-and how to make sure that science gets "a place at the table" in their schools. And here, yes, the contribution of the K-5 teacher leaders to the discussion was critical, because they are the ones who usually are self contained, and therefore cross-disciplinary. These teachers helped the middle grades teachers (who were largely departmentalized) see where the points of collaboration with their peers in math and ELA could be--hmm, maybe they could share the claims, evidence and reasoning framework with them? That could possibly allow analysis of science-related text during English class, so we could do more hands on in the science class! Maybe they could share the productive talk strategies with them?How about the overlap in math practices with SEPs? maybe we could work with our math teacher to leverage that? Having explicit discussions in PLCs and in school visits with their coaches about these issues helped bridge the gap between the teacher leaders in the project, and their peers at schools. However, we would really like to dig deeper into the issues surrounding why this works better at some schools than at others.

I just saw that our paper, Pathways to Teacher Leadership will be coming out at the end of July in Planning and Changing, volume 48, issue 1. The paper describes three different pathways that we have seen teachers travel on the road to becoming teacher leaders.

Good questions. Thanks for asking!  To add to Rachel’s reply…

The district expectation for science instruction weekly was at least:  200 minutes for grades K-2, 250 minutes for grades 3-5 and 300 minutes for grades 6-8.  It is tough to really measure what is happening in the “real life” of a school. However we used anonymous surveys with teachers and principals and got their candid estimates. In both 2015 and 2016, PK-2 teachers reported their students engaging in about 140 minutes of science weekly.  For grades 3 to 5 students, they were estimated at about 200 minutes with no significant change over the years.  However, the middle school students were getting more exposure to science by 2016 compared to 2015 moving from a mean of 234 to 283 minutes/week.  Not quite at the hoped for level of 300 minutes but moving in the right direction.  We need to continue to investigate why these changes did or did not happen in schools. 

We asked teachers about school-level factors that might be barriers to their implementing NGSS.  They rated time to prep for science and the availability of appropriate science materials as more  problematic than they rated time to actually teach science and emphasis on improving standardized test scores (in the context that science is not part of the testing accountability system in the district right now.)  A teacher’s perception of these factors significantly predicted how much time their students spent engaging in inquiry instruction.  We presented some of our early work on this at NARST this year and hope to continue to study this more deeply.  For example, it would be great in the future to have actual measures of time, materials or school-specific accountability pressures along with the teachers’ perceptions of these issues.  

Thank you, Sr. Wolowicki!  The commitment and energy to do these projects gets inspired by the teachers and administrators and students with whom we get to spend time.  There is a lot of joy in doing these programs.  :-)  

Hi Steve, thanks! We are certainly aware of those initiatives-that’s what started the Chicago Mathematics and Science Initiative that Mark Koker referred to in his post. In addition, Stacy spearheaded an NSF project that looked at the outcomes and impacts of this initiative in the years 2002-2008 in her NSF project SCALE UP: Systemic Reform of Math & Science Education in Chicago and are reported on the project website http://www.luc.edu/scaleup/index.php . And as you know, Chicago is a fantasy landscape of ever-changing contextual factors.

In order to provide support for the teachers in the district and in the city, and in accordance with being situated at a Jesuit institution we are very sensitive to trying to be flexible enough to attend to the needs of our community. This can come at the cost, however of having a tight research design-but we are working on that, and hope the future will bring some funding that will help us really drill down on those contextual factors so that we can understand what could make our supports more impactful.

Rachel, I am so happy that you reminded me of Stacy's SCALE UP project. It had been a while! There is much to learn from the evolutionary record of the reform initiatives. Perhaps we tend to look forward, but I can't help but wonder if sometimes we also should to be looking around and behind. Contextual challenges largely remain, as evident in other parts of this thread. Others, for example, have made the point (e.g., Lee Shulman, Ken Wilson) that the education enterprise needs to learn how to build progressively on prior success as seems to be more evident in other fields (e.g. medicine, technology, and engineering). Anyway, I know you understand my point because your work is exemplary in this regard.

Thanks for your kind words, Mark! Actually, our work with CMSI started in 2002, or 2003, depending on how you look at it. We have certainly learned a tremendous amount from working with you and your team. We hope we have had an impact and hope to be able to continue doing so!

Hi Joyce, thanks for asking about this. It is really fun to see these conversations happening! First, the teachers in the lower grades felt intimidated by the middle and high school teachers (we had a few of those for a year or two), but they were usually more adventurous than the others, so they ended up trying new things more readily. Then they shared their experiences with the middle and high school teachers, and that sometimes encouraged the adventure to pass on. I recall a comment by a high school teacher that the discussions were so eye-opening to her, because she had no idea what the students should have covered before they came to her. We found that a really good way to keep these discussions going was to focus on the progressions--for all parts of the NGSS. They are such good documents to keep going back to as a gauge of where things are.

With regard to sustainability, we have one good indication of this. As I mentioned, almost all elementary schools are in Chicago are K-8. But we have worked closely with one middle school, and those science teachers began to form a close relationship with one of their feeder schools and this I think will be sustainable. The administrators at both schools are excited about it and they have adjusted schedules so that the teachers from both schools can meet and collaborate regularly. Just a small example but it is a start. 

Thanks Rachel! We had similar experiences. The upper grade teachers had no idea what the students experienced in grades below them, but they have a better idea now! We have also seen more involvement of elementary teachers (multiple subjects credentials) with secondary single subject teachers about the science. By the same token, we seen an increase in the use of diverse pedagogies of the secondary teachers due to their interactions with the elementary school teachers. Both of these were what we hoped for, but I suspect that continued interactions (which may be difficult in the future since our funding ends soon) may not strengthen these ties. Was that part of your original design? What did you do to foster these interactions? We intentionally set this up by focusing on a scientific phenomenon and examining the science involved - at all levels. The teachers in the PD groups were grade heterogeneous to foster these interactions. We believe we've built a community of educators of all grades, but only time will tell whether this is truly sustainable.

Hi Joyce, thanks for keeping the conversation going. The original design was to work with 3-8 grade teachers,, and the district leaders asked us to add some high school teachers in the second year. We intentionally planned for cross-grade interactions. In year one we focused on the SEPs, so we engaged all of the teachers in activities geared for each grade band--we did not separate them out at all, and everyone participated in the K-2 activity, the 3-5, the3 6-8 and the 9-12--the years we had them. we did have some grumbling from the 6-8 and HS teachers at first, but we chose activities that focused on the same DCIs, and then had them see how the SEPs built over the grade levels. The second year we focused on the CCCs, the third year on the DCIs and each time we held at least one domain constant and allowed the teachers to see how the other domains changed across the grade levels--hope that makes sense. We had a different project (not the one in the video) where we also worked with a multi-grade group and looked at phenomena using the NGSX PD system and that also worked very well. And yes, we will see what is sustainable--but for that we have seen that we need to look at the whole school context, as we have been discussing in other posts here.

...I should add that another possible response of "the body" to the STEM education "infection" is rejection. I have seen examples of this, as well. So, we persevere and celebrate advances!

Thanks for your support, John! We are glad to be doing this work, at the right place at the right time.

Eric, thanks! it has been a pleasure to work with you. Your observations have been thorough and have helped us reflect on the work and see where our efforts are best concentrated. Coherence has always been a concern of ours, and one tool that we keep coming back to, with your assistance, is the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum. Our work with that tool and your observation instruments that align with it has helped us keep an eye on coherence. I look forward to continuing to work with you as we update the SEC for the NGSS.

Thanks Eric! If you are interested there is a longer (5 minute +) video of the teacher consensus conversations on our website www.luc.edu/csme. I also think you might be interested in the classroom videos we have, as you can clearly hear the "interpersonal argumentation" dimensions that your project captures in the student's conversations. That might be interesting to track in the teacher discussions as well. Just goes to show you how important capturing collaboration is at all levels!  I will be very interested in following your project and seeing when the tool becomes more widely available.