Immersive professional development is often used to provide teachers first-hand experience in developing place-based curricula. Knowing this, we had carefully crafted such a professional development for our participants to learn how to engage their students in local watershed research and ecology. However, following year one of a two-year…

Engaging students in inquiry is a key component in order to fulfill essential goals in science education. To achieve successful engagement in inquiry process, students need to feel competent and autonomous in spite of the cognitive and mental challenges the process entails. The study focuses on the "problematizing" mechanisms of…

This paper describes a collaborative project between a district curriculum specialist and university-based researchers to provide on-going support to social studies teachers as they transitioned to digital learning during the Covid-19 pandemic. We developed an asynchronous, on-line and self-guided professional learning project to support teachers…

A year of COVID-19 quarantine required educators to switch from in-person to virtual learning platforms, causing a dramatic reimagining of their daily praxis. Their experiences are likely to influence new norms for K-12 education. While virtual learning can be effective, student engagement, student retention, and student attention can be…

Open inquiry offers students the opportunity to gain 21st century skills and expose them to science practices advocated by Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). While this raises the bar from lower-level inquiry classes, students initially struggle with open inquiry, because they do not know what to expect as they shift from a teacher-directed…

Given the widespread adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards in the United States, there is a need to study new models of professional development to prepare teachers to enact practice-based visions of science learning and to address problems of access to reach teachers nationwide. While studies of online professional development offer…