Kate Geer

CO

Building Ongoing and Sustained Professional Development

Sun, May 22, 2011 6:27 PM
Key Components of Quality PD

This articles uses an example of a PD program in Tennessee to describe what the key components of quality professional development for teachers are. This article would be an informative read for any of the key players in PD-principals, teachers, district personnel, partners at institutes of higher learning or other types of science learning. It describes the key components of successful PD and how each of these participants play a role.

Reinventing the Wheel

Wed, May 18, 2011 10:35 PM
Using the Wheel with Science Investigations

I liked the wheel concept the authors of this article introduced to talk about doing scientific investigations because it represents the dynamic nature ofscience investigations. I could see it being used by a teacher in a elementary classroom to help support instruction in a science investigation.

More Than One “Right” Answer

Wed, May 18, 2011 10:24 PM
Difficult Concept for Students to Understand

Having students understand the nuances of the nature of science and how and why scientists can disagree is an abstract concept for elementary aged students. I thought this article did a nice job of providing support to help students explore disagreements in the classroom. The key piece to this is having students understand why different people might have arrived at different claims based on their evidence and what to do make an experiment consistent. This is a key piece that is often times left out of a classroom setting for lack of time, but including this piece will help students begin to disagree respectfully and learn how to use investigations and evidence to resolve disagreements.