This story also ran on Forbes.com. If 2018 was the year that teachers walked out, scientists and teachers ran for office in unprecedented numbers, and the news was filled with a steady stream of reports on the value of a STEM degree, and 2019 was the year that the public’s respect for teachers grew, walkouts […]
Blog
The ADAPTATIONS blog advances research toward and replication of what works in the STEM education of preservice teachers in high-need school districts through programs’ sharing of evidence-based innovations to encourage adaption by other programs and move forward collective evolution of effective STEM teacher preparation.
How Can Pre-service STEM Teachers Enact Project-Based Learning for Authentic Community Engagement?
Preparing Community Teachers A “Community Teacher” is a conceptual framework for preparing exemplary urban teachers (Murrell, 2000) and highlights the “multicultural competence” teachers need to have. A significant part of this work entails teachers’ reflections on their own identities with the aim of centering the students’ culture and practices in teaching and learning. We began […]
STEM Professional Development That Works
Our question: How can policymakers support standards-based reform? Standards-based reforms in science and mathematics often require significant teacher learning, particularly of subject matter content and new instructional practices. Thus, since the first calls for standards-based reforms, circa 1990, reformers have explored several avenues for supporting teachers’ growth. New curriculum materials, such as those produced to […]
How Can Elementary Teachers Improve Their Ability to Run Productive Science Discussions?
The Challenge of Teaching Science Teaching science is challenging, not in the least because many of the ideas that we ask our students to believe are not obvious. After all, why should we believe the ground on which we stand is spherical rather than flat? Why should we believe that day and night are caused […]
Opportunity to Learn Mathematics: Time, Task, & Talk
Blog reprinted with permission from NCTM’s President’s Messages, copyright 2019, by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. All rights reserved. The question of how teachers of mathematics should structure opportunities to learn (OTL) is sometimes a difficult one to answer. In my own work, I often use OTL as a framework to explore the […]
