Papers and Publications

The adoption or adaptation of Next Generation Science Standards in many US states requires teachers to develop new understandings of curriculum, classroom instruction, and assessment. For high school teachers, the shift is uniquely dramatic, as many have not had opportunities to learn science as a sense-making, collaborative endeavor, as it is envisioned to be in the K-12 Framework. Curriculum co-design has emerged as a powerful professional learning process for teachers, but there are concerns about the cost and sustainability of such co-design efforts. This study investigates the ways in which curriculum co-design supports high school teachers to shift their practice, asking How can variations in a co-design curriculum model provide insights into supporting implementation of ambitious materials? Through an analysis of teacher decision-making in several critical junctures from the co-design of two high school biology units, the researchers draw out four major interpretive lines that support a model for incorporating aspects of curriculum co-design into professional learning experiences at scale. These findings are presented to support those who are designing learning spaces to support profound shifts in teacher practice, while attending to the complexity of teacher decision-making about instruction.

This paper presents findings from a study on changing teacher practice at the high school level in a large urban district in the United States. In the initial stages of the transition to implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards, teachers in the study were using NGSS-designed materials for the first time. Through field testing instructional materials from units in Biology and Earth & Space Science, teachers surfaced the ways in which they used, modified, or rejected instructional routines embedded in the materials from these units. Researchers then worked with the teachers to engage in collaborative analysis of their enactment of the curriculum, determining preliminary models for using a routines-driven curriculum model to support shifts in practice at scale, across a network of schools. The findings from this study lay out a direction for the use of instructional routines as a curriculum design tool for phenomenon-driven science teaching and learning.