provided professional development (PD) targeting the Patterns curriculum (physics or chemistry) was important in supporting their teaching. While several teachers discussed participating in PD offered by out-of-district groups such as the National Science Teachers Association, all teachers commented on their participation in district provided professional development targeted towards implementing the Patterns curriculum. Two themes emerged from the interviews—qualities of effective PD and multiple
• Theme 3A, Qualities of Effective PD: Teachers discussed attributes of PD that were most effective for them.
• Theme 3B, Multiple opportunities and a collaborative culture: Teachers described a variety of professional development opportunities targeted towards supporting Patterns Physics that provided both immediate support in their teaching of Patterns Physics and facilitated collaborative relationships. These opportunities were organized and implemented by district science TOSAs.
Theme 3A. Qualities of Effective PD: The most common participant response
for effective PD was to “be in the role of the student.” A secondary response was for teachers to have time to discuss the unit and assessment. Not explicitly stated, but implicit in their responses was the importance of PD that was targeted towards their teaching of Patterns Physics.
Alex, a mid-career teacher who had helped facilitate PD sessions had this to say about the organization of the PD:
The patterns physics PD courses are basically a carbon copy of what we do in class...It's nice because you get to see what it looks like…. Any trainings I've been a part of, I've made sure it feels, it tastes, it smells just like it does in a
classroom…
The result was for teachers to get a complete experience, so in addition to the experience of doing the activities, the goal was to give teachers the tools and experiences to successfully implement the unit with their students. Alex added,
All those trainings have been very hands on. They're very interactive. You walk away with curriculum, assessments, rubrics, some material sometimes. You're kind of set to get started on teaching that stuff. Across the board we've gotten
really good feedback on that and I certainly agree with that feedback. I had the same experience when I went through it.
Donna, a teacher new to Patterns Physics stressed the importance of doing the unit from the student perspective and explained her experience this way:
Actually, the way that we've done the workshops, going in and doing the labs and doing the projects. Seeing it from a student's point of view. Because we can get, you know, the lesson plans, here's the standards, here's the plans, this is what we're going to do. But, actually, like, doing it has been helpful…feeling like a student in the workshop has helped me in terms of presentation. How organized I feel I need to be.
However, teachers experienced with teaching Patterns Physics expressed different needs. Marie, an early-career teacher who has taught Patterns Physics for several years said:
I feel like around NGSS and the curriculum that we're teaching at the high school level, I feel like most of us have it under control, and it’s just fine-tuning stuff, making it more engaging or fitting it to your kids, or making it more relevant, or whatever. I would like to see a lot of the PD go to the middle school and
elementary school level [with regards to their current work].Just sitting down, talking about the standards, and then having time, after we'd talked about the standards and the facets of how we can reach them, having the time to sit down, as a collective group, and create a finished product.
Theme 3B: Multiple opportunities and a collaborative culture. In addition to
the qualities of a particular workshop or PD session, another quality emerged that may be unique to this district—offering PD in support of the Patterns curricula over multiple years so that every interested teacher could obtain additional support. This longitudinal PD facilitated more in-depth relationships amongst teachers and the district TOSAs. In addition, ongoing PD provided opportunities for teachers to collaborate and share their own ideas and experiences on best-practices that had an important impact on teacher
practice. Gayle, an early-career teacher described their participation in the monthly PD sessions this way.
My first two or three years of teaching the physics curriculum …, [the lead TOSA] would host professional development opportunities for just physics teachers. We would walk through the curriculum and talk about the different labs. We would analyze the rubrics and try to align our expectations for student
mastery of those concepts, how they would demonstrate it, and to what level are we looking. That was extremely helpful for my first two years of teaching, because it was previewing what was coming up and allowing me to adapt that mindset for those skills that we're developing…. I think I went pretty regularly to the PD the first two years and then the third year [it] drops a little bit, but that was extremely helpful.
Shawn indicated that while they thought the summer workshop was most important, the conversations and worktime within the building were also critical to supporting thoughtful adaptations to the curriculum to fit the unique context of their school.
And then having a couple of colleagues that I teach it with, where we together can make it [the lessons] our own in our building. And that was important. So time for teachers … to collaborate and talk about what's working, what's not working, what skills do they bring to the table within their own department, within their own building? I think it does need to be a program that gets adopted and adapted. There were several teachers who referenced the need to “make it their own,” which refers to minor changes to the lesson or handouts to adjust for teacher preferences, classrooms expectations, and culture. Shawn explained it this way, “I think it does need to be a program that gets adopted and adapted.” This adaptation process allowed teachers to modify the curriculum to better fit their programs and schools.
In addition to the workshops and in-building PD, Shawn described the online tools developed by the lead science TOSA that provided opportunities for teachers to view or revisit these resources at their convenience:
[The lead science TOSA] has put together on Teacher Source, a ton of support if you take the time to look at it. There’re videos of what's going on in the
classrooms so you can get a sense of what we're aiming for. Student interaction with the content and there's also some videos about just teacher talk about how to go about this.... [the TOSA] calls it the "Eye on the Prize" ... what's the big thing that we're overarching here. And I think he does a good job with that….
In accessing the TOSAs, one teacher described calling the lead TOSA on the phone to discuss a project. Robert described how the lead science TOSA came to his classroom to model a lesson for an engineering activity:
He developed the bridge unit…when I was interested in teaching it, he actually would come over and take over my class for a period, or a half a period, so I could watch how he does it. Then, I could modify it, I could make it my own with his support. So it introduced a whole new realm of something I could do in the classroom, in a very practical sense…. Personally, I felt very supported in that.
Robert later developed an electrochemistry unit with a unique approach and was then able to share with colleagues in a district PD session.
It was a very short professional development that I put on when teachers saw how simple the structure was, and that the process could be used to engage in a variety of different types of instruction. It just opened a lot of possibilities. So now we have teachers who are using the same experimental design to teach things about electricity. We also have teachers using it to teach reaction series, so a variety of different ways.
Within this highly collaborative environment this teacher developed an innovative way to teach a unit from the current curriculum and share it with others and then the innovation was applied to new contexts by others. This is a wonderful example of how
having a culture that prioritizes time for collaboration could have an impact on classroom instruction.
Summary. Teachers perceived that they benefitted from the PD offered in the
district in support of Patterns Physics. The summer workshop, monthly meetings, and the in-building departmental meetings supported collaborative relationships that contributed to the success of the program. The interviewees clearly communicated that they felt listened to and well-supported. The district science TOSAs provided consistency in the professional development program and fostered a culture of collaboration by supporting teachers through the multi-year PD sessions, site-visits, personal communication, modeling instructional strategies, and providing web-based materials. Having a flexible PD structure allowed teachers to engage at different times and in different ways, thus different teachers responded to different types of PD strategies based on their own professional needs, availability.