This paper reports on creative partnerships to create learning communities to benefit students, parents, and teachers in the urban setting. Science Camp is a university day camp offering problem‐based science exploration for urban middle school students and an introduction to college life. For parents it is an opportunity to learn about college opportunities for their children and to gather information about funding sources. For middle school science teachers and preservice teachers it is a learning laboratory for conducting problem‐based learning in the urban setting. The findings describe the effects of the learning communities on the transformation of students, parents, preservice teachers, and in‐service teachers.
The purpose of this study is to gain insight into the experiences that nationally award‐winning, exemplary science teachers have had over their career and examine the alignment of their responses with calls for K‐12 science education reform from a selection of prominent commissioned government reports since 1980. From an assessment of the alignment of exemplary teachers, calls for reform have had a limited effect and highlight the weakness of using national reports as a wide‐scale, nationalized approach to science education reform. Findings are focused on seven different areas of teacher development: classroom issues, teaching scientific inquiry, use of technology, preservice experiences, professional development of in‐service teachers, vertical articulation, and science education reform over time. Among other issues, the teachers indicated one of the biggest barriers to inquiry teaching is the pressure to conform to high‐stakes testing and the lack of examples of inquiry teaching during teacher education experiences.
Many school districts find that they must hire teachers with science degrees but little or no training in education. Ill-prepared, these new science teachers must discover how to teach on their own. Consequently, 66% of these new teachers will leave the profession within three years (Darling-Hammond 2000, 2003), creating a revolving door of unqualified teachers rotating through our schools. But support programs for these new teachers not only will help them, but also help middle and high school students succeed at learning science. Continually hiring, training, and losing teachers incurs high costs not only in dollars, but in school morale and student achievement. Teacher preparation and ongoing professional support strongly affect students' science performance, and student achievement increases when teachers are well-versed in strategies for how to effectively teach (Wenglinsky 2000). Teachers also need substantial science content knowledge, as well as skills in how to assess and motivate students. Often, the best way to help students is to help teachers. THE SUPPORT NETWORK New teachers need help to identify effective teaching strategies, plan lessons, organize laboratory activities, use technology, identify students' common misconceptions, assess learning, and adapt lessons for students with special needs. It takes time for new teachers to try different teaching strategies and refine them so that they work effectively. From 2003 to 2010, we conducted a quasi-experimental study to discover what forms of support were effective in helping new, uncertified science teachers succeed in the classroom. Using a treatment-control group design, we studied 59 uncertified science teachers hired to teach full time in 35 schools in three urban-suburban school districts in Virginia. We randomly assigned teachers to treatment or control groups and asked them to commit to participating in the study for two years. Each teacher was uncertified but had a bachelor's degree in science. Though these teachers had limited teaching experience, they were granted 40 Kappan April 2011 kappanmagazine.org
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