A primary goal of this dissertation research is to better understand the processes through which teachers adapt curricular reform through implementation in diverse contexts. My focus is on the study of enactment itself, examining how organizational, contextual, and cultural factors become important in the “doing” or use of an innovation. The overarching goal is to understand how to use enactment information of this sort as a feedback mechanism in design. The hope is that diversity across implementation sites will not be a roadblock to the use of curricular innovations. My research questions include 1) How can a curricular design be adapted in support of different goals? 2) What role does local context--including the cultural values, norms, histories, and experiences of a community--play in shaping the nature of teachers’ curricular adaptations? and 3) What are the consequences of adaptations for student learning?

Building on several analytical models from a situative perspective, I am working to articulate a concept of "cultural entailments," that is, embodied characteristics that represent the goals, expectations, histories, values, and practices associated with a particular community of practice. I argue that design, both of the curricular artifacts themselves and of the implementation of those artifacts, is not a neutral activity. As a function of design, artifacts come with a set of cultural entailments. The tacit nature of cultural entailments has often led designers and implementers to overlook the ways in which these entailments shape design and innovation. Highlighting the role cultural entailments play in the design and implementation process leads us to address the fit of the cultural entailments of a reform innovation with the cultural entailments of a community of practice. I argue that the possible areas of conflict between the cultural entailments of designed artifacts and communities of practice may be mediated if they are “made visible” to both designers and practitioners. Making cultural entailments visible may allow designers to strategically support implementation ‘fit’ in targeted settings by bringing awareness to the ways the history, goals, priorities and practices of a particular community can be accommodated or altered through the enactment of the innovation.

The design implications of this research are twofold. First, we need to identify the range of genres that attach or bridge different contexts to an innovation. Second, we need to make patterns of variation in implementation more explicit to the potential users of an innovation so that they can more easily see how that artifact can be made to work in their context, meeting both locally defined and externally defined measures of success.

The Distributed Leadership Study is a longitudinal study of urban school leadership funded by the National Science Foundation and the Spencer Foundation. Building on theories of distributed cognition, this program of research is designed to examine the practice of school leadership in urban elementary schools that are working to improve mathematics, science, and literacy instruction. There is convincing empirical evidence to suggest that the school (not the district or the state) is the most important unit when it comes to the enactment of instructional improvement. This previous research makes the case that instructional improvement depends on school-level factors, especially the school leadership provided by the principal, other administrators, and teachers. However, while we know a considerable amount about the organizational structures and leadership roles that contribute to improved instruction, we know relatively little about school leadership as a practice. Further, what we do know has focused almost exclusively on the school principal, with limited attention given to other administrators and to teachers who frequently take on leadership responsibilities. Finally, the connections between leadership practice and teaching practice are not well understood. This study is designed to explore and understand leadership as a practice of instructional improvement and to examine the relations between leadership practice and teachers’ classroom work. Our goal is to construct a theoretical framework that is grounded in the day-to-day practice of leadership, thereby increasing the relevance of this conceptual framework to practice. We believe that if theory is to be more influential in practice, it will need to grow from practice, providing a frame that helps practitioners interpret and reflect on their ongoing work. Our plan is to share our research findings with policy makers and educators in other schools in order to help them think about their leadership practices.

Mathematics, Science, and Technology Academy (MSTA)

website: http://www.letus.northwestern.edu/msta/

Principal Investigator: Louis Gomez

Research Team: Sam Kwon, Vera Kemeny, Ken Rose, and Claudia Hindo

Contact: Vera Kemeny (v-kemeny@northwestern.edu), Samuel Kwon (smkwon@northwestern.edu).

 We collaborate in partnership with two Chicago public high schools as part of a program initiated by the Chicago Public Schools. The objective of which is to develop Mathematics, Science, and Technology Academies, (MSTA-s), as schools within schools. MSTA-s were envisioned as rigorous programs of mathematics, science, and technology courses that meet the dual challenge of urban education: engaging students in learning while maintaining consistently high academic expectations.

We have taken a professional/learning community approach and maintained ongoing dialog among teachers, counselors, administrators, and university researchers to articulate and share a vision of student success, and implement a daily practice to promote in students values and behaviors that lead to success.

This includes

1.      Teaching practices that are engaging and challenging and fit the needs of the student population to whom it is delivered.

2.      Continuous monitoring and promoting of student academic goals and behaviors       (attendance, work habits, class participation, etc.).

Our involvement includes the following areas:

Participation in the learning community:

We engage teachers in ongoing reflection on the teaching/learning goals and methods that best serve those goals during weekly meetings, one to one conversations, end of semester reflection session, and summer reflection and planning sessions.

Curriculum:

We help in the design and implementation of engaging and challenging curricula. Some of them are based on curricular units designed by Northwestern University staff, some of them are initiated by the teachers. We advocate curricula that enable students to learn concepts through projects based on real-world contexts and incorporate the use of technology.

Administrative help:

We have been helping with the development and ongoing improvement/adjustment of an administrative structure for the monitoring of student progress and the implementation of feedback procedures when adjustment is needed.

Technological support:

We provide teachers with group and individual training to use software that can enhance instruction, engage teachers in reflections regarding how to best apply these technology tools to facilitate instructional goals, and help students in their initial attempts at using new technology.

Documentation:

We create an ongoing record of student progress in terms of grades, attendance, and test scores.  We collect survey data and conduct interviews to learn about student attitudes toward learning and the role of education in their future. We also record class work and collect artifacts during interdisciplinary and other extended projects, and follow teacher development. Our possible future audience includes new teachers as they join in our MSTA's, external parties who are interested in the development of programs similar to MSTA, and the educational research community interested in urban education.

Reformers have often looked to curriculum materials as a means to influence teacher practices and found instead that it is the materials that wind up changing while local practices remain unaffected (Cuban, 1992; Cohen, 1988). Many efforts have sought to shape what students learn by limiting practitioner discretion over the curriculum (Dow, 1991; Welch, 1979), while others have enlisted practitioners in the development of locally relevant curriculum materials (McLaughlin, 1976; Elmore, 1979). While the former extreme stresses fidelity to a common vision, the latter embraces the variations that arise from the unique conditions and circumstances of local contexts. This portrait reveals a tension for curriculum designers between the desire to preserve the core ideas of the reform and the need to accommodate its necessary adaptation by practitioners. 

This tension can also be formulated as a design challenge: Is it possible to design curriculum materials that are sufficiently flexible to be used in a diverse range of classroom settings yet sufficiently resilent to retain the core principles of the reform?

To address this challenge, I will present a framework for empirical investigation of the different ways that teachers abide by, adapt and improvise with innovative curriculum materials during instruction. I will compare qualitative cases of three middle school science teachers' classroom enactments of the 10-week Global Warming Project <http://www.letus.northwestern.edu/projects/gw>, examining the factors that influenced how they each perceived, appropriated and employed different features of the design. In tracing the dynamics of these teacher-curriculum encounters, I explore the nature of artifact designs (e.g., Norman, 1988), the nature of teachers' knowledge (e.g., Shulman, 1986; Grossman, 1990), and how elements of each interact during instruction.

Through the teachers used the same set of materials, they each perceived different resources and produced different outcomes. Yet there were important similarities in the processes by which each teacher made the GWP their own. I conjecture that the key to understanding the interactions between curricular designs and teacher practices lies beyond analyses of static artifacts and their use, but rather in the processes by which teachers perceive and manipulate such artifacts during instruction.Thus, rather than focusing on ways to render preconceived visions of instruction, designers should aim to accommodate and support the dynamic and constructive processes that practitioners engage in during implementation. Promising strategies for achieving this vision target ways of representing conceptual, procedural, and material affordances of the design in ways that are visible, meaningful, and workable for teachers.  

What do young people need to be able to do to get the most from project-based science? What strategies do we need to embed in projects in order to support students’ learning? In what ways can curricula designed to be culturally responsive also be made linguistically responsive to the needs of students? LeTUS curricula, although developed to build on theories of learning suggested by cognitive science and by science education, needs also to take into account the different funds of knowledge, or culturally based knowledges and ways of knowing, using language, and making sense of the world that are represented in the families and community organizations served by the school. Without knowing more about the cultural experiences and knowledges of the students in the project classrooms, we cannot know whether the driving questions are authentic and represent real-world concerns for these youth. It is important to ask what linguistic--that is, language, literacy, and technology skills--are engaged by such curricula and their accompanying texts, and how these skills shape students’ opportunities to learn. We are addressing these issues in three arenas.

One of the most important exploratory studies we propose is a community ethnography of one community served by one LeTUS school. This ethnography will provide us with information about what the students bring to school and what their communities value in relation to science. We hope to identify themes that represent the various science-related interests, goals, and funds of knowledge of community members. We are in the process of identifying key individuals, families, and community organizations (e.g., churches, businesses, activist groups) whose input could provide us with a sense of the community’s interests, goals, and funds of knowledge.

Second, we have conducted a content analysis of the air and water curricula in which we examine the written materials to assess 1) the discursive and literate demands embedded in the curriculum, 2) the ways the curriculum signals to teachers that they should include opportunities and scaffolds for students to engage in oral and written scientific discourse, and 3) the ways the curriculum draws from and connects to the funds of knowledge about science available to students in their homes and communities. We have identified the various types of vocabularies evident in the curricula, focusing specifically on science content words (e.g., riparian zones), science process words (e.g., dependent variable), and everyday words that have unique meanings in scientific contexts (e.g., bank, quality). In one school with a large number of Spanish dominant students, we have also examined how these terms translate into the dominant language of the students.

Third, we are engaging in classroom research to document how the teachers and students are currently using language, literacy, and oral and written discourse in the context of the curriculum. Initially we proposed to examine how technical language, themes, and concepts are chosen from and enacted in the curriculum by the teachers. We had hoped to examine the ways teachers provide “discursive scaffolds” to connect scientific concepts, themes, and vocabularies to students’ existing funds of science knowledge and ways of knowing. We also hoped to examine how, if at all, students and teachers begin to integrate scientific discourse genre with their everyday discourse genre of home, peer group, and community. Unfortunately, many of our efforts in this study have been hampered by changes in teaching staff, so we have reoriented our analyses of the classroom to focus on what we can learn about the students.

The purpose of this research is to understand how the Lucent Leaders in Learning Class, a professional development program in Chicago, supports teachers in the day-to-day enactment of LeTUS curricula while also developing their understanding of inquiry-based learning. I am investigating how the class leaders--who are experienced LeTUS teachers--designed the class and how that design supports teachers in the day-to-day enactment of the curriculum, while also helping them develop an understanding of some of the main principles of inquiry pedagogy.

The Lucent Leaders in Learning Class was developed to help teachers enact LeTUS curricula. But what does that mean? Does that mean helping them know what materials to buy and where to buy them, or how to move kids from one activity to another, or how to deal with the logistics of the technology? Or does it mean helping teachers see the ways software can be integrated into a curriculum, or does it mean engaging them in discussions about the content and how to teach that content? Or is it a combination of both? I am investigating the kinds of issues the Lucent Class facilitators and participants grapple with as they support one another enacting LeTUS curricula.

Since I am interested in the focus of the class discussions, I am analyzing the topics of conversation--science content, pedagogy, logistics, inquiry, classroom management, technology, and assessment, among others--and the different activity structures that foster different topic discussions. Do some activity structures better lend themselves to preparing teachers to enact a lesson? Do others better support them reflecting and extrapolating big ideas about inquiry-pedagogy? I am also analyzing the pattern of discourse. Who initiates different topics? How do teachers engage in discussions about inquiry and their curricula? How does the discussion support teachers as they prepare to enact and reflect on their enactment? Ultimately, I want to understand the connections and interactions among the different aspects of the Lucent Class "system."

My initial findings suggest that this class has been successful at supporting teachers in enacting LeTUS curricula, primarily by providing a vision or model of enactment for teachers new to inquiry pedagogy. In this environment, teachers see models of other novices (novice in relation to this style of teaching) changing practice. The teachers use these images as they enact different lessons and this helps the teachers develop a ‘vision’ of inquiry pedagogy for themselves.

This work focuses on the development of a new, more precise language that transforms descriptions of science content as they appear in curricula, standards documents, and policy statements into complete descriptions of students' learning practices. Current descriptions of science content are ambiguous about the type of understanding we want to engender. For example, Science Standard D.3 as written by the National Research Council (NRC) says, "all students should develop an understanding of the Earth in the solar system" (1995, p. 158-161). In the text description of this standard, NRC identifies one of the major goals for grades 5-8 as, "an understanding of Earth and the solar system as a set of closely coupled systems." However, the "fundamental concepts and principles" that students should know can easily be recalled without the understanding the idea of a system. While this is clearly not what standards writers intended, the vagueness of the standards in their ability to describe exactly what "understanding" entails makes it possible to interpret these as a list of things to be recalled. The shortcoming is not in the inclusion of the facts, which are clearly important in building domain expertise, but that, in sections on content, descriptions end there.

The solution under investigation is the development of a new language of content that integrates scientific process and content, thus clarifying how those processes relate to specific content. This integration then provides a means for identifying student understanding. The preliminary development of the language is close to completion. I am planning to track the effectiveness of this language in differentiating among students' learning practices in classrooms using project-based and traditional curricula as the context. By describing content in terms of students' learning practices, it will allow standards to be written that describe more precisely the understanding and high-level learning goals that they seek to engender. It will also provide guidance for how these goals might be achieved in the classroom given specific content. In terms of curriculum design and evaluation, it may provide new/additional insight into the types of activities and scaffolding that can best support students in developing higher-level understanding. I am planning an investigation that will explore how it might provide a means of differentiating between inquiry-based and traditional classrooms. This offers the possibility in the future, if learning practices can be tied to student outcomes, of validating inquiry classrooms.

This research investigates the literacy design challenges inherent in project-based science curricula. Our curricula are heavily technology-embedded and allow, to varying degrees, text-based, multimedia-based, and discourse-based representations of material by students as they discuss what they know about the science and process of discovery. Anecdotal reports from graduate students and from LeTUS teachers suggest that language minority children and children with poor literacy skills experience challenges in locating, communicating, interpreting, and summarizing data. What are these challenges, specifically? What do teachers do to support struggling students? What do they add or take away from a curriculum to accommodate poor readers, for example? What can be designed into the curriculum to support literacy while teachers and students are doing science? How do we design structures for comprehensible access to the science content? What opportunities do these students' language arts classes provide for instructional coherence between language arts and science?

In the fall, I interviewed 10 LeTUS teachers and asked whether they could predict how successful their students would be enacting the curriculum and indicate what criteria they would use to make this determination. I also did case studies in classes enacting our  curricula and found that participation in inquiry-based discourse is often challenging because students don't have conceptual linkage skills or prior understandings to draw from. Reified words like "measurement" and "research" often are not understood. The tools alone don't support students' understandings of how to plan, organize, identify relevance, narrow down, communicate, and so on. Teachers use several methods to scaffold literacy, including developing advanced organizers; redesigning Center curricular materials; assigning supplementary readings; providing iterative opportunities to review activities and concepts; helping students identify, record, and interpret key information using multi-literacy approaches; and supporting peer-to-peer apprenticeship and translation activities.

This is a multi-methodological study of fifth- and sixth- grade bilingual Spanish-speaking children at Reilly Elementary School in Chicago. It is part of a larger research project of literacy at home and at school in which we focus on children's literacy skills and activities in science and language arts, and in experiences outside school.

Phronesis is the Aristotelian concept of practical wisdom. It is used to establish a template for structuring cases of exemplary practice grounded in the insight that practice cannot be well-represented apart from the context that gives it sense. This dissertation research will contribute to understanding how school leaders can establish the conditions for successful enactment of LeTUS curricula. Specifically, I will create design principles for improving the practice of school leadership through the development of innovative learning technologies. Designing such systems requires an understanding of how to use exemplary leadership practice to support interested learners.

Phronetic cases are organized around the problem-setting and problem-solving phases of how school leaders design artifacts, such as policies and programs, to help build developmental capacity in schools. This research focuses on how leaders at a particular urban elementary school design and use artifacts--the school improvement planning process, professional development programs that rely upon faculty expertise, and teacher monitoring and evaluation programs, for example--in order to open a window into leadership practice and reveal how (and whether) leaders’ day-to-day tasks make sense in relation to organizational goals and beliefs.

The research method, based on participatory design theory and distributed cognition, involves engaging in ethnographic fieldwork documenting artifact design and usage, constructing cases to illustrate the practical wisdom involved in design, implementation, and reuse, and  building interdependent, multimedia versions of these cases to test with interested practitioners in order to determine how (well) phronesis has been captured and communicated. The case design principles developed here flesh out an innovative conceptual framework that can serve as a foundation for communicating phronesis--the practical wisdom of the organization-- to aspiring school leaders through multimedia technologies.

My interests lie in the area of trying to understand ways of changing instructional practice through existing cultural practices in schools. To that end, I have been closely examining science fair practice--the ideas and activities of it--to understand the ways it connects to project-based science. I want to know how we might make use of science fair to disseminate the ideas and activities of inquiry science as we currently understand them.

My work has taken me into the classroom to observe three teachers as they have carried out project-based science units and science fair activities concurrently. I am interested in the ways the teachers connect these practices to provide the kind of instruction that they think will be valuable to the students.

I have also been doing archival research into the history of science fair. If we, meaning the education community, understand where instructional practices come from and the specific ways they evolve, perhaps we will be able to influence the course of the practices more effectively. The history of science fair will also help me interpret current science fair practices and their relationship to new ideas of doing inquiry science as expressed in policy and in research. In short, I believe that culture and instructional practice go hand in hand and want to better understand how to get to know and use culture to leverage organizational change.

The Chicago Public Schools Urban Systemic Program (CUSP) is a five-year professional development reform effort funded by the National Science Foundation. The goals of CUSP are to significantly increase the mathematics, science and technology content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge of the CPS instructional workforce. These goals will be met through targeted professional development courses for CPS teachers; all CUSP courses are co-designed and co-taught by Chicago-area university
faculty and CPS teachers. Additionally, courses may be used in support of Elementary and Middle School Mathematics and Science Endorsements. Within this partnership, LeTUS is responsible for designing course prototypes that will serve as the foundation for professional development efforts.                  

One of the goals of research in science education is to develop and study new images for instruction. Although there is certainly much variety in the positions adopted by researchers, many of the recently proposed innovations share a common orientation: They are driven by the desire to embed K-12 classroom learning in rich, meaningful contexts. The instructional approaches produced by this orientation have taken a number of forms and have been given a number of names, including “project-based” instruction, “anchored” or “problem-based” instruction, and “learning-by-design."

In other work I have referred to these as task-structured, as opposed to traditional content-structured curricula. This new wave of curricular innovation shows great promise. However, the field is in dire need of new frameworks for studying and describing the conceptual change that is associated with task-structured curricula. Because task-structure curricula often address content across a range of traditional disciplines, task-structured curricula tend to produce learning outcomes that are difficult to encapsulate and characterize. Thus, although we can certainly build on existing theoretical and methodological foundations, substantially new frameworks are needed for research to continue.

For this reason, I hope to devise theoretical frameworks and methodological strategies for characterizing conceptual change in task-structured curricula. To develop these new frameworks and strategies, I am undertaking an empirical program of research based on student interviews and classroom observations. The first product of this research will be an assembly of theoretical frameworks and methodological strategies that I will refer to as the “Conceptual Dynamics” program. Second, in parallel to the development of the Conceptual Dynamics program, I will apply the program to attempt to answer some questions about learning in task-structured curricula. What do students learn and fail to learn in task-structured curricula? Is the learning that occurs in task-structured curricula, in any sense, fundamentally different from the learning that occurs in content-structured curricula? This work will ultimately be suited to a range of scientific domains and will describe conceptual change at the level of multiple interacting knowledge systems.

The purpose of this study is to characterize the range of implementation strategies teachers use in enacting inquiry-based curricula and the motivations behind those strategies. We have been studying four teachers’ enactments of key inquiry activities in the Struggle for Survival curriculum to understand their beliefs about inquiry teaching. It is important to note that the analysis for this study was based on videotaped classroom observations and interviews that were gathered in previous studies. Therefore, the teachers’ beliefs about inquiry were conjectured from the strategies they used during the activities and from their responses to interview questions.

From this preliminary study of four teachers, we have created a framework that we believe captures some key components of inquiry teaching and challenges for teachers and students in inquiry. The framework gives us an instrument to guide us in characterizing teachers’ enactment of inquiry activities. For example, if inquiry involves different expectations about what counts as an acceptable answer, how do teachers set up the task? How do they communicate the “rules” of inquiry? Furthermore, if inquiry involves a shared responsibility for teaching between the teacher and the students, what opportunities do teachers give students to develop inquiry skills such as forming hypotheses and gathering and interpreting data?

We believe this framework will be useful in studying future enactments of Struggle in order to characterize the range of implementation strategies teachers use in inquiry teaching. Consequently, we are about to begin the next phase of the study, in which we will test the scope of the framework we created. We will be studying teachers who are new to the Struggle curriculum in both Evanston and Chicago schools, focusing on the same key episodes within the curriculum. In addition to videotaped classroom observations, we plan on interviewing teachers to try to understand what they find challenging about teaching inquiry-based curricula and what they do to meet these challenges. We are also interested in the different ways in which the students understand science as inquiry and whether this curriculum has any affect on their views of science as inquiry.

IERI Grant for Developing the Professional Development – Student Achievement Link.

This 18-month planning grant will begin to design a data system and large-scale study to better understand the relationship between teacher professional development and student achievement in urban science classrooms. Much previous work in this area focuses on narrow facets of this relationship, and often fails to simultaneously address 2 key components: how professional development experiences impact what actually occurs in the classroom, and how this translates into student achievement. By addressing these, and other, vital facets of the relationship, such as the role of school reform efforts, and by expanding the definition of professional development experiences, the large-scale study ideally will be able to shed light not just on whether, but how and why professional development experiences impact students.

The planning work will include development of a model of the relationship, identification of which aspects of the model are appropriate for the large-scale study, and development of instruments and methodologies to capture them. In order to anchor the concepts of professional development experiences, classroom enactment and student achievement, teachers and students from LeTUS classrooms will be used in both the planning effort and the larger scale work. 

PI: Brian Reiser and Daniel Edelson

Contact: Elena Kyza <ekyza@northwestern.edu>

"Analyzing Scaffolding Software in Educational Settings in Science" (Project ASSESS) is a 3-year, National Science Foundation (NSF) funded research project, that falls under the theme "Knowledge Distributed Intelligence" (KDI).  The project emerged with the realization that the educational community has yet to come to consensus on what constitutes a scaffold, a concept accepted unanimously by everybody but defined in several different ways. This causes miscommunication and creates a chasm in the shared body of knowledge, with significant implications for both the researchers and the practitioners alike.

The KDI/ASSESS project seeks to both theoretically articulate and empirically assess the role and effectiveness of scaffolds, embedded in learning environments comprised by software and curricula.  

Contact: Gabrielle Matese <matese@northwestern.edu>

In this earth science unit, students explore factors affecting the variation in Earth's global temperature. Using WorldWatcher data visualizations and data from other offline investigations, students generate and test hypotheses about the temperature variation.

In this curriculum, students explore the major factors affecting temperature on earth and then use what they learn to make temperature predictions (and in turn, identify the habitable areas) on a fictional, "newly discovered" planet.

In order to make their temperature prediction for the new planet, students must answer the follow driving questions:

-What are the major factors that affect surface temperature?

-How do each of these factors affect temperature (in other words, what is the actual effect)?

-Why do each of these factors have the effect that they do?

These questions motivate a series of investigations (consisting of both hands-on labs and computer-based activities) in which students examine the different factors affecting temperatures. The curriculum concludes with students' final presentations in which they describe their findings and make a recommendation for where the new planet should be colonized.)