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1. River’s Edge Construction: Students Engineering Solutions to Prevent Local Flooding.

   Harris, T.; Lee, M. J.; Gutierrez, K; Kidd, J. (July 2023, NSTA post)

   This article outlines the key components of the River’s Edge Construction lesson plan. An explanation of how the lesson was delivered is presented alongside suggestions for implementation by K–6 teachers. The integration of scientific literacy is discussed first, followed by a discussion of each of the 5Es (Bybee et al. 2006). A timeframe for distributing the lesson phases is given; however, the activities included in this plan (see Supplementary Resources for specific lesson materials), should be modified to meet the needs and interest of students, and to align with allotted instructional time and objectives. 

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2. Teacher Decisions and Perspectives in Scratch TIPP&SEE Implementation

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3641554.3701885  

   Liu, Jonathan; Goodwin, Erica; Saito-Stehberger, Dana; Jacob, Sharin; Warschauer, Mark; Franklin, Diana (February 2025, ACM)

   According to an ecological affordances perspective, any static curriculum has a set of affordances, and differences in teachers, students, and the teaching environment change how those affordances are viewed and used. Therefore, teaching is a relationship between the curriculum, the teacher, and the students. As such, it is not only possible but expected that a teacher will diverge from the details of a lesson plan to better accommodate the needs of themselves as a teacher and their students as learners. In this study, we report on a mixed-methods investigation that explores the different ways upper-elementary and middle-school (7- 13 y.o. students) teachers implement the Scratch-based TIPP&SEE learning strategy and the reasoning for their approaches. As expected, we find that teachers across grade levels often deviate from lesson plan details to cater to their own classrooms. For example, teachers serving younger grades were far more likely to keep scaffolds that lesson plans suggest removing. The varied degree of deviation suggests that the repeated use of a learning strategy, alongside lesson plans that present a variety of scaffolded implementations, is beneficial in enabling teachers to adapt lesson content to serve the needs of their specific classroom. 

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3. On the Development of Cybersecurity and Computing Centric Professional Developments and the Subsequent Implementation of Topics in K12 Lesson Plans (RTP)

   Robins, Andey; Burrows, Andrea C.; Borowczak, Mike (August 2022, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   In recent years, Wyoming has developed Computer Science (CS) standards for adoption and use within K-12 classrooms. These standards, adopted in January of 2022, go into effect for the 2022-2023 school year. The University of Wyoming has offered two different computer science week-long professional developments for teachers. Many K-12 teachers do not have a CS background, so developing CS lessons plans can be a challenge in these PDs.This research study is centered around three central questions: 1) To what extent did K-12 teachers integrate computing topics into their PD created lesson plans; 2) How do the teacher perceptions from the two CS PDs compare to each other; and 3) How was the CS PD translated to classroom activity? The first PD opportunity (n=14), was designed to give hands-on learning with CS topics focused on cybersecurity. The second PD opportunity (n=28), focused on integrating CS into existing curricula. At the end of each of these PDs, teacher K-12 teachers incorporated CS topics into their selected existing lesson plan(s). Additionally, a support network was implemented to support excellence in CS education throughout the state. This research study team evaluated the lesson plans developed during each PD event, by using a rubric on each lesson plan. Researchers collected exit surveys from the teachers. Implementation metrics were also gathered, including, how long each lesson lasted, how many students were involved in the implementation, what grades the student belonged to, the basic demographics of the students, the type of course the lesson plan was housed in, if the K-12 teacher reached their intended purpose, what evidence the K-12 teacher had of the success of their lesson plan, data summaries based on supplied evidence, how the K-12 teachers would change the lesson, the challenges and successes they experienced, and samples of student work. Quantitative analysis was basic descriptive statistics. Findings, based on evaluation of 40+ lessons, taught to over 1500 K-12 students, indicate that when assessed on a three point rubric of struggling, emerging, or excellent - certain components (e.g., organization, objectives, integration, activities & assessment, questions, and catch) of K-12 teacher created lessons plans varied drastically. In particular, lesson plan organization, integration, and questions each had a significant number of submissions which were evaluated as "struggling" [45%, 46%, 41%] through interesting integration, objectives, activities & assessment, and catch all saw submissions which were evaluated as "excellent" [43%, 48%, 43%, 48%]. The relationship between existing K-12 policies and expectations surfaces within these results and in combination with other findings leads to implications for the translation of current research practices into pre-collegiate PDs. 

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4. WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR GEOMETRY TEACHERS TO IMPROVE A LESSON? A MULTIMODAL ANALYSIS

   Schwarts, Gil; Jeon, Jeon; Herbst, Patricio; Brown, Amanda (October 2023, Proceedings of the 45th Conference of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education)

   Lamberg, T; Moss, D (Ed.)

   A central goal of lesson-centered professional development programs (PD) for mathematics teachers is to learn by constructing an artifact, for example, by designing and improving a lesson plan together. That leads to the questions, what does it mean, for mathematics teachers, to improve a lesson? And how can improvements be accounted for in the analysis of the resulting artifacts, especially when these are multimodal? This paper lays the groundwork for answering such questions by drawing on empirical data from a lesson-centered PD program for secondary geometry teachers. We show how semiotic choices were made to convey that the teacher would need to support students when geometry instruction moves from a construction task to a proof, by (1) addressing students’ confusion; and (2) creating a shared language to discuss diagrams. We relate these findings to teachers’ professional growth and the conference theme. 

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5. What does it mean for geometry teachers to improve a lesson? A multimodal analysis.

   Schwarts, Gil (November 2023, Paper to be included in the proceedings of the 45th annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education. Reno, NV.)

   A central goal of lesson-centered professional development programs (PD) for mathematics teachers is to learn by constructing an artifact, for example, by designing and improving a lesson plan together. That leads to the questions, what does it mean, for mathematics teachers, to improve a lesson? And how can improvements be accounted for in the analysis of the resulting artifacts, especially when these are multimodal? This paper lays the groundwork for answering such questions by drawing on empirical data from a lesson-centered PD program for secondary geometry teachers. We show how semiotic choices were made to convey that the teacher would need to support students when geometry instruction moves from a construction task to a proof, by (1) addressing students’ confusion; and (2) creating a shared language to discuss diagrams. We relate these findings to teachers’ professional growth and the conference theme. 

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