Science Education: Tailor Made, For Pre-K to 12th Grade Teachers

Science education at its best involves keeping up with current scientific knowledge, engaging in scientific questions, collecting evidence, crafting explanations, comparing conclusions with established scientific understandings, and justifying explanations. The majority of these elements involve language arts skills – reading, communication, and especially writing. The purposes of this course are to guide participants to sharpen inquiry science teaching skills and develop an initiative (skill, lesson, unit, or project) that will take your science teaching to the next level.
Using inquiry-based learning as a conceptual framework is essential to effective science instruction. The more we focus on guiding students to think like scientists the better. Early in the course, teachers will assess their understanding of scientific content and inquiry-based teaching as vital information for working with the instructor to tailor the professional learning experience to individual needs. Teachers will read and discuss texts that reveal new discoveries and provide case studies for promising science teaching, participate in hands-on and minds-on activities, explore science instruction inroads and roadblocks, get feedback from colleagues, use guided planning time and small group coaching sessions to achieve the purpose of the course.

Goals in support of the overall purpose of the course are to:
-Investigate and share up to date scientific understandings and discoveries.
-Emphasize inquiry science as a conceptual framework.
-Explore science inquiry and its strong links to English Language Arts skills – Reading, Writing, Speaking & Listening, and Language.
-Identify a meaningful and practical initiative.
-Promote collaboration between teachers.
-Provide a face-to-face and online hybrid professional learning experience.
-Tailor the learning experience to meet individual professional goals.

Most modules will follow a two-week rhythm – the first week being time for individuals and possibly small groups to complete assignments and the second being a time period for online, phone and potentially in person discussion and wrestling with module content. Think of the first week as one characterized by “getting stuff done” and the second as a more mellow one - “reflecting and deepening understanding of the stuff that got done." As an overall guideline, participants will be expected to work between 6-10 hours per module.