Research on science education in Africa shows many teachers continue to use traditional lecture methods even when curriculum favours more student-centred approaches. This paper explores science teacher professional learning as a means to realise practice change at a crucial time of curriculum reform in Ghana. The study was a qualitative formative…

Reforms such as the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) call for substantial change in teacher practice such as instruction that is more phenomenon-based, three-dimensional, supportive of student epistemic agency, and coherent from the student perspective. Such change requires ongoing support in the form of aligned curricular materials and…

Curriculum-based professional learning is not just having teachers read curriculum materials, but rather includes carefully crafted experiences to support their sensemaking, deep understanding of the curriculum and its pedagogy, and ability to transfer that knowledge into practice. This instructional model requires that teachers be responsive to…

This study explored a middle school science teacher's curricular sensemaking in interaction with their use of an educative storyline curriculum, aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards, that was intentionally designed for more opportunities for students' scientific sensemaking. Using a phenomenological case study methodology, we examined…

Science education is shifting from a vision of students memorizing facts towards engaging in figuring out the natural world as students build ideas from their own experiences and backgrounds. This shift is hard for teachers. One way to support teachers is curriculum-based professional development, which pairs high-quality instructional materials…

Over the course of a two-year curriculum field test study that implemented a curriculum-based professional learning framework, we investigated the factors that influenced teachers' willingness and ability to implement NGSS-aligned, phenomenon-based storylines for teaching the nature of science, evolution, and climate change. Through qualitative…

There is a need for greater guidance in preparing pre-service teachers to enact culturally relevant pedagogy while maintaining the content and rigor of mathematics and science in middle and secondary grades. This study investigated a group of pre-service teachers' plans to implement culturally relevant pedagogy in middle/secondary mathematics and…

There are situations where teachers accustomed to years of traditional teaching are tasked with implementing inquiry-based science teaching in schools nationwide, with few professional developments to change their self-efficacy. The implicit expectations are that teachers' self-efficacy will improve as they implement inquiry-based practices over…

Research-based science curriculum has become a common means of supporting best practices in science teaching. In response to his middle school's transition from one such commercially available science curriculum to another, a seventh-grade science teacher elected to make certain changes to the newly adopted curriculum in its first year of use.…

The recent implementation of The Victorian Curriculum F-10: EAL requires content teachers who teach EAL students to be familiar with the revised EAL curriculum for the purposes of planning and developing approaches to assist learners' development in English. In the literature and in curriculum frameworks, word knowledge is considered an important…

In this study, a Scientific Communication Curriculum (SCC) was designed for middle school students and teachers to equip them with scientific communication (SC) skills, and the skills included in the SCC were integrated into the middle school lessons. Within the framework of the Curriculum Design Research (CDR), designing the Scientific…

This paper reports an empirical study of teacher development in the process of implementing an integrated science curriculum in a junior high school in China. Six science teachers with different subject backgrounds were invited to participate in this study. A pragmatic model of teacher learning that includes both cognitive and situated-learning…

Environmental education researchers and policy makers acknowledge the need to act responsibly toward the environment. Yet, teachers do not always know how to help students translate environmental knowledge into sustainable action. This study examines the implementation of locally developed place-based education (PBE) curriculum for middle school…

Teachers and students had to use distance education environments due to the COVID-19 pandemic that suddenly emerged globally. This research aims at obtaining the views of gifted students who took the differentiated science curriculum (DSC) and teachers who conducted the DSC on the distance education process. The research was designed as a case…

This paper reports the struggles of 24 pre-service teachers (PTs) while intentionally integrating anti-racist pedagogy in which they were trained in a secondary teacher education program. PTs participating in this study are from various disciplines (i.e. Science, Math, English and Social Studies). Our findings reveal a multitude of struggles that…