Search for: All records

This symposium will focus on five projects’ professional development efforts to enhance educators’ understanding and use of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Involving educators from preschool to middle school levels in diverse contexts, each project has worked in this problem space in different ways. Of central importance to all the projects is how the NGSS necessitate productive classroom discourse, but the projects differ on how to support educators to achieve “rich science talk.” For example, an “assessment for learning” lens guides one group’s work, while recognizing language and argument as epistemic tools is the driving conceptual framework for another. In this symposium, project leaders discuss the decisions and dilemmas of, and the lessons learned from, their work. This highly interactive session includes brief introductions from each project followed by time for interaction with the projects’ researchers and materials. Projects will bring materials such as scaffolds for collaborative instructional planning, a formative classroom observation tool to support teachers’ use of productive classroom discourse, and examples of instructional units with 7 curricular features designed to support the vision of the NGSS. The session will culminate with time for crosstalk and discussion.