The purpose of this article is to introduce the unit-structured diagram and a professional development workshop using the diagram. The diagram consists of three areas, including objectives, content, and assessment. The objectives section is an area to identify learning outcomes based on physical education national standards. In the section of…

Professional development programs aim to make long-lasting change to teacher practice. However, these programs are often short-lived due to limited personnel, cost, and time constraints. Using an actor-oriented approach, this study aimed to understand how teachers transfer their learning from a professional development program focused on…

Expanded and revised to include four entirely new chapters, this thoroughly updated edition presents a model for how educators can design high-quality, challenging, and supportive learning opportunities for multilingual learners. Starting with the premise that conceptual, analytic, and language practices develop simultaneously as students engage…

Teachers' practices and interactions with curriculum materials are influenced by a host of factors, which include their values. The mechanisms of this influence may benefit from elucidation. Here, we describe a case of a teacher enacting an inquiry-based learning unit (LU) as part of a school science enrichment programme. The teacher's…

The benefits of using digital games in the curriculum are well documented in literature. Most teachers who use digital games use short-form drill-and-practice learning games rather than the kinds of games most students would choose to play in their free time. The use of more interactive, immersive digital games (IDGs) in classrooms tends to be…

We report on one teachers' efforts to re-design an entire instructional unit as a coherent storyline about forces and motion as a part of a multiyear professional development (PD) project around the NGSS. Designing coherent storylines demands that teachers create opportunities for students to meaningfully engage in science practices in order to…

"Project-Based Learning in the Math Classroom" explains how to keep inquiry at the heart of mathematics teaching and helps teachers build students' abilities to be true mathematicians. This book outlines basic teaching strategies, such as questioning and exploration of concepts. It also provides advanced strategies for teachers who are…

The second edition of "Keys to Planning" builds upon the information shared about effective curriculum, unit, and lesson design by introducing current research and thinking related to curriculum design. The information presented in this second edition also captures insights and suggestions from classroom teachers who have attended…

This 13th report in WestEd's evaluation of the K-8 Early Implementers Initiative for the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) provides an extensive response to the following question: What does NGSS science teaching look like in the classroom? The report first discusses Initiative teachers' experiences with four instructional practices that…

A variety of practices and specialised representational systems are required to understand, communicate and construct molecular genetics knowledge. This study describes teachers' use of multimodal representations of molecular genetics concepts and how their strategies and choice of resources were interpreted, understood and used by students to…

This study investigates how a teacher study group collectively examined problems in their current English curriculum and redesigned the curriculum into theme-based lessons for various grades. Comprised of seven elementary school teachers and a teacher educator, the teacher study group met bi-weekly for three hours for a total of eight meetings.…

The best science teachers are not only experts in teaching and knowledgeable about science content, but they are also great at teaching science. They have specialized teaching knowledge, including knowledge of effective pedagogical practices in science, student difficulties with understanding content, and curricular purposes. As a result,…

This study compared the efficacy of 3 approaches to professional development in middle school Earth science organized around the principles of Understanding by Design (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998) in a sample of 53 teachers from a large urban district. Teachers were randomly assigned to a control group or to 1 of 3 conditions that varied with…

This article addresses what was learned through the National Computational Science Leadership Program about involving teachers in planning high quality units of instruction around computational science investigations. Two cohorts of roughly 25 teacher teams nationwide were given opportunities to develop "replacement units." The goal was to support…

Phase 9, a teacher-designed, classroom centered model, takes teachers through a nine-step process that results in the development of integrated instructional units. Teams of teachers come to an intensive five-day training with lessons they know work well with students. In interdisciplinary teams, they fold technology, state and national standards,…