The recently released report Science and Engineering in Grades 6–12: Investigation and Design at the Center makes a strong statement right in the title: engaging students in scientific investigations and engineering design should be the core of what teachers do in their classrooms. Other blog posts have described how investigation engages students in doing science and the role teachers play in facilitating students’ investigations and reasoning—and that this is a role that few teachers have been prepared to play.

There is much to be done to support current teachers in taking on this new role. At the same time, however, over 150,000 college students complete traditional teacher preparation programs each year and enter the teaching workforce, and these programs need to evolve to support future teachers in their new roles as well. As the report states, “teachers need not just science content knowledge, but also personal experience with the process of investigation and design and time to reflect” about those experiences (p. 7-18). Recommendation 5 of the report emerges from that need: “Undergraduate learning experiences need to serve as models for prospective teachers, in which they experience science investigations and engineering design as learners.”

As a faculty member at a university with a large and long-lived teacher preparation program, I recognize the challenges underlying recommendation 5. The science courses that future teachers take in college are typically spread across disciplinary departments; instructors who teach those courses may or may not be aware that there are future teachers in their classes. Most of the science courses future teachers take are not part of their preparation program, but are general education requirements. As described in Chapter 7 of the report, these courses rarely provide students with opportunities to engage in investigation and design. Even as the evidence mounts for the effectiveness of active learning strategies not only for increasing student learning but in narrowing achievement gaps, uptake of these strategies is still not widespread in undergraduate science courses.

Active learning strategies include small-group discussion and using classroom response systems to pose questions—these approaches (further described in Chapter 4 of Reaching Students) incorporate aspects of investigation and design, and can build habits that are helpful for future teachers. They do not necessarily engage students in the full suite of science and engineering practices to build their understanding of core concepts, but they are a step along the way and can be leveraged to further transform undergraduate science courses to better serve prospective teachers.

The report also describes several ways in which undergraduate learning experiences can serve as strong models. Many universities offer science courses specifically for future teachers—where these already exist, they can be modified to incorporate more opportunities for future teachers to ask questions, plan and conduct investigations, collect and analyze data, and work together to build their understanding of phenomena and address design challenges. In my own experience, designing such a course in Earth science required rethinking the course from the ground up to make substantial, sense-making investigations the core of my instruction, but the benefits are already paying off as I see my students delve into each new map we look at and start to build connections between concepts.

Other successful strategies have involved providing future teachers with research opportunities through both course-based research experiences, such as in the Research Methods course of the UTeach curriculum, or through externally-funded summer research experiences, such as the Science Teacher and Researcher (STAR) program, which recruits students enrolled in STEM teacher preparation programs and places them in national laboratories for a summer research internship while also pairing them with a master teachers and science education faculty member.

There are two keys to making these experiences effective. The first key is reflection: beyond experiencing investigation and design as learners, prospective teachers need the opportunity to articulate their own learning process and reflect on how to incorporate it into their classroom, especially when it is very different from the way they have learned science in the past.

The second key is that one such experience is not enough. Ideally, all undergraduate science courses that future teachers take would involve investigation and design. University faculty involved in teacher preparation and education research play a critical role in making this happen, by providing evidence of the effectiveness of active learning and investigation in improving all students’ performance—not just future teachers—to their peers and administrators, and even leading professional development for their peers to support them in transforming their courses or developing new ones.

Education is a complex system, and systemic change requires considering all components of the system and how they interact. This report can serve as a resource for university faculty and administrators interested in making change happen in their component and its interactions with the K–12 system.

Anne Egger is an Associate Professor of Geological Sciences and Science Education at Central Washington University and a former president of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT). She is a member of the Committee on Science Investigations and Engineering Design Experiences in Grades 6-12.

Last spring, an article in the April/May 2018 issue of Science Scope highlighted a community partnership between a middle school in Massachusetts and a group of scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). In the article, Engineering Partnerships, the authors describe a successful, engaging engineering design project developed by a classroom teacher and a WHOI scientist who studies deep-ocean microbes.

Creating these types of partnerships can be highly rewarding for both students and educators. That is why organizers of the 8th Annual STEM Forum & Expo, hosted by NSTA this coming July in San Francisco, have devoted an entire strand on the subject. Sessions in the “Building STEM Ecosystems: Community Partnerships” strand will highlight select preK–16 partnership initiatives that have been successfully implemented and have demonstrated positive outcomes. School administrators will learn ways to assess the effectiveness of these partnerships.

Sessions in the strand will also guide participants on how to leverage local resources and build partnerships with community organizations such as government agencies, engineering firms, factories, farmers, agricultural extension offices, doctors, and hospitals. These partnerships provide STEM experiences that allow students to develop the skills and mind-sets needed to answer complex questions, investigate global issues, and develop solutions to real-world challenges.

The Earlybird Registration deadline for the 8th Annual STEM Forum & Expo is May 13; register early to save. This unique, focused event, held July 24–26, 2019, at the Moscone Center West in San Francisco, provides resources for educators and organizations seeking to learn more about STEM education, associated outreach programs, partnerships, schools, and curricula. In addition to the Community Partnerships strand, the forum will also feature strands and sessions geared toward elementary, middle, high school, and post-secondary educators. Attendees are eligible to earn graduate-level credit.

Visit the conference website for more information on the STEM Forum & Expo. We hope to see you this July in San Francisco!

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With very cold weather settling into many areas, children’s outdoor time may be restricted due to temperature and wind chill limits set relative to the temperature ranges normally experienced in their area. ChildCare Aware of North Dakota’s guidelines include:

• Outdoor play is recommended when temperature/wind chill is 15 degrees F or above.
• Use caution when temperature/wind chill is between 0 to 15 degrees F.

Sasha Martin’s blog post about the variety of acceptable temperatures for outdoor play, “How cold is too cold for recess? 24 parents across the globe weigh in,” shares parents’ experiences from around the world. Obtaining appropriate winter weather clothing for all children in a program, and having it available when needed, can make it possible to be outside even in what feels like very cold weather. 

On a walk in the neighborhood preschool children noticed goldfish swimming in a fish pond that had a thin ice sheet around the pond edges. Such an observation could be the beginning of an investigation into how local animals are able to survive and even be active when temperatures are uncomfortable for children without thick jackets and mittens. We talked about how different animals have different needs as we wondered. We decided that something about their environment makes it possible for the fish to stay alive–our evidence was their active presence. (I wanted the specific information for my own curiosity and read up on the University of Illinois Extension Service’s site about how the properties of water create an environment where hardy fish survive.) Maybe you’ll only see evidence of an animal’s presence (deer droppings). Observing from a window allows animal counts to be made without disturbing the animals.

In her Science and Children article, “How Do Plants and Animals Prepare for Winter? Local resources support an outdoor inquiry-based project” (2017), Brooke Larm writes about preschoolers’ exploration into how and why the plants and animals living in a place might change over time, how they could be connected, and how their coexistence could support their survival. Using a 5E structure and the Project Approach method, teachers and children explored the farm, discussed what fall meant to them, and had many first hand experiences which they documented through journaling, and photography. They created a “Wonder Wall,” posting questions, thoughts, and photos, a method of making their learning visible for the children and their families. Children’s drawings, “their representations of learning as documentation,” were used by teachers to help them assess children’s understandings and planning for further investigation of their essential question, “How Do Plants and Animals Prepare for Winter?”

Focusing children’s attention to seasonal changes of any kind supports their developing understanding of natural phenomena and their place on the planet.

“Arguably, the most pressing challenge facing U.S. education is to provide all students with a fair opportunity to learn” (Framework; NRC 2012, p. 282). This challenge is of great importance as we continue to embrace changing demographics in our classrooms, communities, and country. Our imperative is to maintain high expectations and broaden access and opportunities in STEM education to increase the likelihood of student success and to prepare them to compete globally. — 2019 NSTA National Conference Committee

Science teachers from all over the country, and even the world, will gather for our national conference this spring. And we have a lot to celebrate, including our 75^th anniversary. As part of the celebration, you’ll be seeing how much NSTA has changed over time, and a huge part of that change has been the inclusion of so many different types of science teachers, who are able to model for students that any one of us can be a scientist.

Conference organizers, with an eye toward advancing the best and most inclusive strategies for teaching science, offer a special strand “Confluence of Equity and Education” at our 2019 National Conference on Science Education, in St. Louis, April 11–14. Sessions organized around this strand include a featured presentation on Thursday, April 11, 3:30 to 4:30 PM (“Equity: The Power of Understanding the Impacts of Equity and Science Instruction”) by Joseph Davis, Superintendent, Ferguson-Florissant School District; and Tiffany Besse, Chief Academic Officer, Ferguson-Florissant School District. Davis and Besse will focus on the importance of serving all children with the high-quality education they deserve, particularly those who statistically are predicted to fail in the current model. Discussion centers on how partnering with NGSS-focused curriculum leads to equitable instruction in the science classroom and improvement in overall quality of education for students, teachers, and community. This strand will be targeted by level: novice, intermediate, or advanced attendees.

And there will be hundreds more sessions in St. Louis that focus on equity in science education; below is a small sampling:

• Equal Access to Science: Universal Design and Students with Disabilities
• STEP UP 4 Women: Bringing the Representation of Women in Physics to 50% with High School Interventions
• A Cancer Education Curriculum for Underserved Elementary Schoolchildren
• Meaningful Notebooking!
• Two Growth Mind-Set Activities to Help Motivate and Teach All Students Nature of Science
• Equity, Leadership, and Change
• Standards-Based Grading: Impact on Student Engagement in a Science Classroom
• STEM Teaching for Dummies: How to Build a STEM Kid Using Nothing but Who’s Already in Your Class
• Inviting All Students into the NGSS: Fostering Equitable Learning Communities Through Culturally Relevant Science Teaching
• Launching Your NGSS Unit: Focus on Equity and Access
• Providing Equitable Learning Experiences for ELLs in Science
• Counter Racism Science Pedagogy: Race, Racism, and Science Through History and into Our Classrooms
• Non-Scientists: The Forgotten Majority
• When Physics and Pop Culture Collide! Strategies for Engaging Assessment and Instruction
• SC-10: Equity Through STEM Education (ticket required)
• All Kids Have A Voice: Using Protocols and Other Activities in the Middle School Science Classroom to Build Equity
• Empowering Experiences for Girls in Computer Science
• Counteracting Implicit Bias in Science Classrooms
• Vocabulary Instruction for English Language Learners!
• Can You Hear Me Now? Doing Science with Students with Limited and Interrupted Education (SLIFE)
• Connecting Makerspaces to Speech and Occupational Therapy
• STEM, Language, and Learning
• Supporting All Students to Make Sense of Phenomena by Building All of Their Intellectual Resources
• CEREBROedu/BRAINedu: Education and Family Engagement Around Brain Health in Latinx Communities

Extend your exploration of equity beyond our borders and attend Global Initiatives Enhancing Science Education: An International Share-a-Thon and Poster Session on Friday, April 12, in Grand Ballroom D/E, Hyatt Regency St. Louis at the Arch. Join the organizers to hear about international initiatives and programs on diverse areas of science education, including formal elementary to college science education, best practices, novel content delivery, scientific literacy, policy standards, and informal education.

Pro Tips

Check out more sessions and other events with the St. Louis Session Browser. Follow all our conference tweets using #NSTA19, and if you tweet, please feel free to tag us @NSTA so we see it!

Need help requesting funding or time off from your principal or supervisor? Download a letter of support and bring it with you.

And don’t forget, NSTA members save up to $90 off the price of registration. Not a member? Join here.

Future NSTA Conferences

2019 National Conference
St. Louis, April 11–14

2019 STEM Forum & Expo
San Francisco, July 24–26

The mission of NSTA is to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.

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