Recent Work of the MSC Partners in Urban Settings

Northwestern University

BSCS

It's About Time

University of Illinois at Chicago

Northwestern University

The Northwestern team is led by Daniel Edelson, Louis Gomez, and David Kanter, all faculty in the School of Education and Social Policy.  Most of their work with urban schools has been conducted in Chicago and surrounding areas.  In recent years, their work in Chicago has included:

Center For Learning Technologies in Urban Schools (LeTUS) – Gomez, Edelson, Kanter: Today it is well recognized that educators, broadly speaking, must find a way to establish better commerce between research and practice.  While this remains a knotty problem today, its solution was even more opaque in 1997.  With funding from the National Science Foundation and colleagues from Chicago Public Schools, Detroit Public Schools and The University of Michigan, Northwestern University started the Center for Learning Technologies in Urban Schools. The Center focused on a broad array of activities.  Its centerpiece was the creation of a middle school science curriculum that is deeply infused with technology and works for students and teachers in urban classrooms. 

Lucent Foundation Program for Teacher Leaders – Gomez, Edelson: With support from the Lucent Foundation, we created a professional development program for teachers involved in LeTUS.  We created graduate credit courses for teachers that were tightly linked to LeTUS curriculum units.  To enroll in the course, a teacher had to be implementing the unit during the time of the course.  The course provided teachers with the background in content, pedagogy, and technology-integration that the teachers, many of whom were teaching outside their area, required to implement the units successfully.  Courses were co-taught by Northwestern researchers and CPS teacher leaders. 

The Chicago Urban Systemic Program (CUSP) Gomez, Kanter: One of the products of the LeTUS effort was an approach to professional development that used the enactment of curriculum as a site for collaborative professional development among teachers.  With funding from the Lucent Foundation, members of the LeTUS Center, along with teachers, created several working examples of this approach to professional development.  With support from the Chicago Urban Systemic Initiative, Louis Gomez and his colleague Brian Reiser, worked with several local Chicagoland universities to create a version of this approach to professional development that would be available to Chicago teachers from across the city.  The general idea behind this approach was to create common professional development courses that focused on the analysis of student work and student thinking using a common set of inquiry-based curricula as the site of these development activities.

Math Science Technology Academies (MSTA) – Gomez: In 1998, the Chicago Public Schools created the Math Science Technology Program.  It was meant to be a way to create ambitious math and science instruction in neighborhood high schools.  One element of the program was that each school was encouraged to select a local university research group as its technical assistance partner.  Louis Gomez and colleagues) were selected to support the MSTA efforts at two Chicago high schools, Clemente and Fenger.  The emphasis of this effort was to create a math, science, technology-focused effort using a school-within-a-school model within each of these neighborhood high schools.  In both schools, the collaboration extended for four years, building from freshman class to senior class.  Both schools showed superior achievement and superior performance on other aspects of student life, like attendance when MSTA students were compared to their peers elsewhere in the building.  The Clemente relationship continues today.  The small school approach to instruction, adopted by the MSTA, has expanded to the whole school where there are now six small learning communities which focus their efforts on inquiry-based instruction across the curricula.

Minority K-12 Initiative For Teachers And Students (MKITS) – Kanter:  This NIH-funded project has developed and is offering graduate level courses for high school science teachers that is cross-listed in the School of Education and the Biological Sciences Department. The course integrates science content and inquiry pedagogy to explore how to work with students' ideas about human biology. It is designed around a high school human biology unit developed by Kanter entitled Diseased Detectives.  Teachers experience each lesson as a student, implement the lesson in their own classroom, and return to class the next week to reflect and discuss with their classmates. The course is designed to support teachers intellectually as they consider the decisions they make planning and teaching Disease Detectives, by providing them with biology content knowledge and the pedagogical approaches.  An interesting dynamic in the course is that teachers are joined by graduate and undergraduate students in biology and education will also participate in the course.

Professional Development for Investigations in Environmental Science – Edelson:  Northwestern University first offered professional development for Chicago Public Schools teachers for Investigations in Environmental Science in 2000, as part of its field test.  Since then, we have continued to offer annual summer institutes for Investigations teachers.  Beginning in 2004-5, Northwestern, in conjunction with CMSI, began offering ongoing PD activities throughout the school year.  This program is continuing in the 2005-6 school year.  This professional development is designed to help teachers learn the pedagogy, content and technology of the curriculum along with supports on student thinking, assessment and enactment.

Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS)

BSCS has been using the NACL model with urban districts since 2001. The first academy cohort included teams from San Diego City Schools, Cincinnati Public Schools, Pittsburgh Public Schools, and Los Angeles Unified School District. The second cohort added teams from Boston Public Schools and in 2004 BSCS began working with 12 districts from Washington state, about half of which are from urban areas. There are two major components to our work with these districts. The first is to develop leadership capacity to support the selection and implementation of new science curriculum materials. We developed the capacity for curriculum leadership over three years by building knowledge and skills in four key areas:

1. Awareness: Making the Case for Change

Curriculum implementation begins with developing an awareness of reform-oriented, inquiry-based instructional materials that align with the National Science Education Standards. Based on this awareness, districts build a case for change by assessing their current science program. They do this by examining student achievement as well as teachers’ knowledge and beliefs about learning and teaching science.

2. Selection: Applying Effective Tools for Change

The second stage of the implementation process focuses on the selection of standards-based instructional materials designed to improve student learning. Selection involves using evidence-based tools to determine how well instructional materials align with science content, teaching, and assessment standards.

3. Adoption: Implementing a Strategy for Change

In the third stage of the process, adoption, the district leadership teams focused on designing a professional development infrastructure to support teachers’ use of inquiry-based science ins0tructional materials. Adoption includes planning an implementation strategy through ongoing professional development and using data to inform decisions.

4. Impact: Sustaining the Capacity for Change

Analyzing the impact of curriculum implementation on students, teachers, and the school community is the fourth stage of the process. This stage expands a district’s capacity to sustain the implementation process by focusing on how well students are learning science concepts when teachers use standards-based approaches to learning and teaching.

The second component of our work with urban districts is technical assistance. The technical assistance for each district was personalized based on needs each leadership team identified. As part of this technical assistance, BSCS has conducted numerous on-site professional development sessions that have ranged from in-depth co-teaching workshops on science as inquiry to leading seminars with materials selection committees.

It’s About Time

It’s About Time, in conjunction with the developers of EarthComm, Active Physics, and Active Chemistry, has provided coaching and professional development in support of the implementation of the programs in urban school districts through out the country, such as: Los Angeles Public School, CA; New York City Public Schools, NY; Seattle Public Schools, WA; Denver Public Schools, CO; Boston Public Schools, MA; Prince George’s Public Schools, MD; Cincinnati Public Schools, OH.

Their current collaboration with the Los Angeles Unified School District is a good example.  This work includes intensive on-going professional development services extended over several years, the development of a local leadership team in order to assure the building of capacity and longevity, and a coaching infrastructure to support the implementations within each of the school buildings.

The It's About Time/LAUSD Professional Development and Implementation Plan extends over a three-year period and includes several strategies to help prepare and support teachers, district leadership and administrators working to implement the district-wide 9th grade implementation (45,000 students and 450 teachers) of the It's About Time's Integrated Coordinated Science curriculum. The Plan provides extensive Professional Development in the instructional model and content areas for teachers, as well as helps to build the district's local leadership capacity and infrastructure thus assuring the success of the implementation and longevity of the professional development support within the district.

 The 450 teachers implementing the program are given the necessary release time to attend regular implementation workshops run by the district's teacher/leadership team. Leadership training and workshops for the teacher/leader team in the instructional model, pedagogical approach and content of the materials is also regularly scheduled.  On-going professional development training and workshops are also provided to help develop another level of teacher/leader, the coach/mentor, who works within each of the 11 local districts providing an infrastructure of support to teachers within their school settings.

University of Illinois-Chicago

Dr. Kimberly Gomez leads the UIC team.  In 2000-2001 Dr. Gomez led a collaborative design team composed of middle school science and special education teachers in the infusion of literacy supports into the LeTUS Behavior Matters middle school science unit.  The supports, based on reading-to-learn theory, were subsequently implemented in ten 5th-8th-grade classrooms in a CPS K-8th elementary school.  Students showed significant gains in science content and process knowledge as measured by unit pre and post-tests. 

In 2003, Dr. Gomez led a collaborative design team composed of high school reading specialists, social studies and science teachers.  The goal of the team was to develop a method for pedagogically infusing and supporting summarization and the use of an on-line tool, Summary Street, as a reading-to-learn tool in social studies and science classroom.  Pilot results of the implementation in 5 classrooms indicated that teachers’ believed that students’ read science text more closely that students’ felt they understood the science text more deeply as a result of using summarization as a literacy support tool.

Gomez’ current research and development work includes a recently completed collaborative design activity during which three science teachers worked with Gomez and a colleague to analyze the IES unit and infuse reading-to-learn supports into the IES curriculum.  The literacy support tools and activities are in the first year of implementation in a local CPS high school.