Teaching Fellows' Meetings

For their fall meeting, the 2005 Physical Science and Math Teaching fellows met in Arlington, Virginia to investigate strategies for differentiating instruction for academically diverse learners. The workshop was led by Amy Germundson, former high school chemistry and physics teacher and a current doctoral student at the University of Virginia. A graduate student of Dr. Carol Tomlinson (a nationally known expert in differentiation,) Amy consults with high school science teachers on differentiating instruction. The focus of her workshop was on planning science curriculum and differentiating lessons to meet diverse student learning needs, based on student readiness, interest and learning profiles.  The fellows used the strategies they learned in the workshop to incorporate differentiated instruction into their lesson study and will implement additional strategies before the spring meeting, when they will meet with Amy again.  In addition to Amy's workshop, the 2005 Fellows used a critical friends' protocol to develop individual goals for their annual KSTF teaching portfolios.  

The spring meeting of the 2005 Science Teaching Fellows was held in San Diego, California. Joyce Tugel, an expert in formative assessment, facilitated a workshop for the fellows designed specifically to enforce and build upon what they learned at their fall meeting about using formative assessment to elicit students’ science ideas. The workshop took their knowledge of formative assessment and the questions that remained for them following their opportunities to implement the probes with their students, and put it all into the context of research on student learning. Specifically, they investigated Black and Wiliam’s research on student learning and Driver’s research from Making Sense of Secondary Science. Following this grounding in research, the fellows worked on looking at learning via formative assessments from the perspective of the student, especially in terms of the usefulness of scores and comments on student papers. They investigated and engaged in giving feedback on assignments, as well as questioning and argumentation, as ways to understand what students know. The fellows also discussed formative assessments that they have used and those they have written, and worked on improving those.

The fall meeting of the 2005 Science Teaching Fellows was held in Boston, Massachusetts. Page Keeley, an expert in formative assessment, a senior science program director at the Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance, and the president-elect of the National Science Teacher’s Association, facilitated a workshop for the fellows on how to use assessment data to change their teaching and help their students improve the quality of their science understandings. Embedding assessment in instruction became central to the fellows’ developing understanding of how assessment can be used throughout a unit to inform teaching and learning. During the workshop, the fellows analyzed student work and probes from Page’s books Uncovering Student Ideas in Science: 25 Formative Assessment Probes and Uncovering Student Ideas in Science: 25 More Formative Assessment Probes, which are designed to elicit students’ ideas about a variety of science concepts and inform teaching decisions. The fellows used the probes as a foundation for discussing the importance of identifying these ideas before, during and after lesson implementation. Page also worked with the fellows on how to integrate what they learned during the workshop into their practice.

In addition to the formative assessment workshop, the fellows used a modified version of the critical friends’ protocol to identify and narrow their goals for their annual renewal portfolios.

October 13-14, 2006

The fall meeting of the 2005 Science Teaching Fellows was held in Tempe, Arizona. The purpose of this meeting was to study the physics and chemistry modeling curriculum developed at Arizona State University. This curriculum views a small set of basic models as the content core of physics and chemistry. Its developers state that one of its goals is "to engage students in understanding the physical world by constructing and using scientific models to describe, to explain, to predict and to control physical phenomena." The 05 fellows spent a day and a half working with two expert teachers, Larry Dukerich and Kelli Gamez-Warble, on this curriculum. Larry and Kelli have extensive experience facilitating modeling workshops and using modeling with high school students.

In addition to the modeling workshop, the fellows spent time working on developing skills as reflective practitioners, through writing and discussing the standard and evidence that each has chosen for his/her renewal portfolio.

April 28-29, 2006

The spring meeting of the 2005 Science Fellows was spent in Boston, Massachusetts, studying the Living by Chemistry (LBC) curriculum under the guidance of Jennifer Claesgens, an experienced chemistry educator who has worked extensively with LBC. LBC was designed by chemists and chemistry educators at the University of California, Berkeley. This innovative high school curriculum is student centered and encourages students to engage in investigations and in-depth discussions of core chemistry concepts. High schools in Boston have adopted LBC for their chemistry classes and the fellows observed one class at Boston Latin School in order to see LBC being used with students. In addition to this work with LBC, the fellows worked on their modified lesson study units and their renewal portfolios during the meeting.

October 14-15, 2006