New Perspectives in Science Education

The Partnership for Effective Science Teaching and Learning (PESTL) brings together five school districts and two universities to provide sustained and comprehensive science professional development with the goal of improving student learning, interest, and achievement in science. The PESTL program focuses on teachers development of the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to effectively engage students in gathering science information, reasoning to develop explanations supported by evidence, and communicating science explanations using models and arguments supported by evidence.

The PESTL program is a three-year professional development program for teachers in grades 3-6. The program is currently in year three with the second cohort of 120 teachers. Teachers annually participate in over 100 hours of science professional development with the following objectives:

1) Increase teacher pedagogical content knowledge in science specific to disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts, and science and engineering practices;

2) Develop teachers’ use of effective instructional strategies in science;

3) Develop deep understanding of science standards;

4) Refine alignment of instructional resources and formative assessment tasks to the science and engineering practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas;

5) Develop meaningful and useful understanding of the nature of science;

6) Increase teachers’ interest in and enjoyment of science learning.

The PESTL program includes a five-day summer seminar, two after school instructional alignment sessions and an annual content course specific to each teacher’s grade-level (two Saturday sessions and online modules). These components of the professional development are linked through structured science professional learning communities (PLCs) facilitated at each school by a teacher facilitator who has received additional preparation. The approaches to instruction presented in the PESTL professional development program are strongly influenced by the research presented in the National Academies of Sciences, Taking Science to School.

Sustained professional development changes classroom instruction. Instructional strategies to engage students in using evidence to support explanations showed significant differences from students in classrooms of teachers not receiving professional development. The changes were significant after two years and the trend continued after three years. Structuring the science practices in ways that lead to communicating science reasoning provides a useful platform for teachers to engage students in developing skills across the literacy expectations of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts. Engaging students in meaningful science performances requires instructional strategies and structures to examine phenomena, classroom expectation for student engagement in reasoning, and norms for communicating through writing and oral discourse.