Hi Dr. Whittington! Thank you so much for watching! I can partly attend to your question about the participation in the science activities in helping teachers to foster productive science talk. By engaging in these activities throughout the PD they are positioned to be in a student role, working collaboratively and getting to interact with the facilitators who model facilitation of productive talk. From my experience with our teachers, being able to participate in these robust tasks and actively engage in sensemaking they learn certain moves or questions that they want to incorporate in their classroom to foster productive talk! 

Hi TJ! Thank you so much for watching our video, we are so glad you enjoyed it! 

Hi Tom! 

Our in-cycle school research team is quite involved with the phases especially our graduate students who collaborate with some of our teachers during the design, analyze and refine phase. I know one of my colleagues has worked continuously with one of our first groups of teachers to continually refine and further develop lessons that came from the PD. That's a very interesting implication from your research and definitely something I think our team could learn from. We currently do pre and post-summer surveys, interviews, and a noticing video task that helps us understand how teachers are engaging with the PD as well as how we can better enact the PD. I know that we have adjusted the tasks and what teachers will engage in based on our previous summer experiences. There are definitely some challenges we've faced especially with COVID and how it's affected the ability to recruit participants. We have a really wonderful group of faculty and graduate students that have mitigated a lot of the challenges with their quick thinking and problem-solving. I know I've learned so much from them on how to be flexible and adapt! 

Thank you for such great questions and I'm glad you liked the video! 

Hi Mike! It is so good to hear that you enjoyed the video! 

A lot of the instruction in the PD is exactly what our teachers are engaging in in their own classrooms, from the robust tasks to the questioning and moves to facilitate talk. I too am excited to see what our PD this summer will bring and the new information it will provide us! We work with mainly high school biology teachers, however this summer we are also working with high school environmental science teachers and have previously worked with middle school biology teachers and chemistry teachers. We don't have any indicators of this type of instruction working for one discipline over another, hopefully, it benefits them all but such an interesting point! 

Hi Gülcin! I am so glad you enjoyed watching the video! I think that there are many things applicable to different disciplines of science as well as math from this collaborative PD effort. As far as distance learning we do not have it as part of our summer PD, but this year with COVID many of the in-school cycle teachers we followed had remote learners which brought about challenges we've since overcome. Distance learning actually provides to spur an additional project for us in creating a space where science teachers across the whole southeast U.S. could discuss lessons and support one another! I think it would be great to have something larger and for more than just biology or chemistry but inclusive of mathematics as well! 

Hi Gülcin! Thank you for your questions and interest in our project. 

While we are still collecting data as part of our larger project. One thing we have found is that you really have to start with a robust and rigorous lesson, one that is field-tested and stands up in the classroom. This is not necessarily a new idea, however, when revising lessons with productive discourse in mind, it is better to start with a strong frame.

 

Another finding relates to the power that different actors have across a lesson (e.g., launch, main activity, and wrap-up). We’ve found that it is not enough for the teacher and the curriculum to frame lessons in the way of doing science (and likely the ways of doing math) or to provide students with opportunities to engage in small group discourse but, instead, that the wrap-up, often a portion of the lesson that is short, holds a lot of impact. In the wrap-up, a teacher can be the central actor providing students with the correct canonical answer to the task or the students can be the central actors and the teacher can play a supporting role in orchestrating their ideas towards a shared understanding of a canonically correct answer. When the wrap-up is handled in the first way, students come to view such activities as ones in which they will do “some work” with their peers but that, ultimately, they will be provided with the correct answer, potentially reducing the value they hold in their work. A wrap-up approached in the latter way has the potential to position students to see the power of their work in constructing knowledge, especially when this strategy is used over the course of the year. I imagine that this is also an important consideration in terms of supporting students’ mathematical thinking such that attending to students’ ideas in the conclusion of a lesson can shape how they see their work and engage in developing understandings in subsequent work.

 

A tool that we use and that you might find useful is the Goals for Productive Discussion and Nine Talk moves presented by The Inquiry Project.  

I think that our PD is different from the modeling instruction (coming from knowing very little about the modeling instruction and I have really enjoyed the link you provided)!  I say this because one of our main goals of this project is to look at the role of collaboration and how it benefits teachers in fostering productive science talk in their classrooms. Teachers are engaging in materials during the PD that helps them use specific tools and practices but are positioned as a student during PD. And while I cannot refute or support the 2-3 weeks of full-day practice for teacher shift, our teachers who participate in our in-school cycles of design, teach, analyze work through learning to support science talk in their classrooms throughout an entire year. Several of our in-school years from previous years still continue to work with us. I know as we go into our summer PD for this year we are excited to learn more from our teachers and how we can support them in supporting productive science talk in their classrooms. Thank you so much for the questions! 

Hi Ozlem! Thanks so much for your question and interest! 

One of the main goals of the LCD PD project is to engage teachers design of tasks and lesson plans and support their ambitious teaching practices. Through summer LCD PD, teachers have presented some tasks and lesson plans and work on some aspects of them like guidance questions, the flow of the lesson, and uncertainly in the tasks. We can say it is more like a collaborative work through PD that continues in-school cycles as well. During the in-school work, teachers co-think with other teachers and some of our research team to design the lessons further, with revisions after they teach the lesson as well. I think it would be great to include different disciplines! 

Hi Caroline! That is so exciting to hear about Math ed, your video was great and I see the exact same parallels you noted! As far as teachers engaging as learners and what they learn, members of our research team are working on looking at how teachers engaged with this position and what experiences they had. I'd like to think that this could evolve into learning something new about this positioning, and hope that we'll be able to have more to share soon! 

Great--we are digging into that data as well. We'll have to compare notes!