Teaching Science to At-Risk Students: Teacher Research Communities as a Context for Professional Development and School Reform

Project 4.1 Overview Principal Investigators: Beth Warren — Chèche Konnen Center, TERC Ann S. Rosebery — Chèche Konnen Center, TERC Final Report Executive Summary In first through seventh grade in bilingual classrooms, CREDE researchers examined in and out of school interactions of culturally and linguistically diverse students to find ways to improve children's encounters with academic literacies in school; in science in particular. Teachers and researchers collaborated to integrate teacher inquiry in (a) science and (b) children's ideas and discourse to discern ways to harness the affordances of different ways with words and ways of seeing that children from diverse communities bring to the study of science. The heart of science education reform is inquiry-based instruction that emphasizes meaning and guided immersion in a community of practice, building on children's ideas and prior knowledge, and assisting them to develop mature concepts and practices representative of the science community. Rosebery and Warren found that classrooms that support this type of activity—inviting children to find science meaning in fellow students' ideas, ways of talking, and ways of seeing, and engaging children in active inquiry into their own accounts of scientific phenomena—are highly engaging to children who in other situations might likely feel marginalized by science. Classroom practices designed to engage children in exploring the potential meanings and functions of their own ideas and ways of expressing them resulted in: high levels of participation by diverse students understanding of the scientific phenomena beyond the scope of the curriculum an expanded repertoire of sense-making practices relevant to science learning and teaching, and greater performance on selected TIMSS multiple choice problems by first through seventh grade participants than the international results for eighth graders. Researchers documented the many ways those practices can be harnesses pedagogically to support deep scientific understanding for all children. Warren and Rosebery contend that one of the pressing goals of education in the 21st century must be to assist children to understand one another's ideas and sense-making practices, to become aware of the affordances and limits of those in relation to different contexts, to see how what they already know relates to sense-making practices in science, and learning to appropriate unfamiliar practices for their own purposes as learners.