JoinAll Resources
Book Chapter
Bending the Professional Teaching Continuum: How Teacher Renewal Supports Teacher Retention
This chapter is built on the premise that science teachers develop their practice along a professional continuum that consists of recruitment, preparation, new teacher induction, ongoing professional development, and advanced certification or master ...
Book Chapter
No Boundaries: The Role of Mobility in Recruiting New Teachers and Developing New Leaders
The development of teacher leaders in any discipline is hindered when the pool of available candidates is shallow, and developing science leaders—whether at the classroom, district, state, or national level—largely depends on having a rich and ro...
Book Chapter
Professional Learning Communities: School Collaboration in Implement Science Education Reform
It has never been more important for teachers to work together. We must learn from each other, open up our classrooms, share student work, serve as mentors and coaches, and work with mentors and coaches. Until recently, training and professional deve...
Book Chapter
This chapter addresses how to create a community of minority science teacher leaders who are not only committed to teaching in urban schools, but also to helping close the achievement gap, especially in the area of science education. It also explores...
Book Chapter
Assessing Assessment to Inform Science Leadership
This chapter uses the ReaL Earth System Science project as a metaphor for investigating the landscape of assessment in science education. This framing turns the focus of the five questions away from the Earth system and toward the system of education...
Book Chapter
Care to Share? The Marymount School Science Department Professional Development Program
This chapter reveals how one school, The Marymount School of New York, developed a goal-setting model. This model effectively promotes innovation in the classroom, in the curriculum, and in the school and involves teachers in the decision-making proc...
Book Chapter
Leadership for Public Understanding of Science
Science is generally considered to be one of the most important subjects in the school curriculum, even if it does not receive as much attention as math and reading-language arts, which have always formed the central core of the elementary school cur...
Book Chapter
Science Communication and Public Engagement With Science
It is the responsibility of all who have a passion for science and science education to serve as ambassadors of science because we need as many great communicators of science as possible. The first section of this chapter provides useful tips for edu...
Book Chapter
The Many Faces of Leadership in a Complex Environment
While the full implementation of the leadership approach recommended in this chapter has many facets, the foundation of that leadership style is to “keep you eye on the prize.” That is, every decision should consider at its nucleus how it will su...
Book Chapter
Content Coverage in the Role of Instructional Leadership
The variability in content coverage is likely to produce differences in student learning outcomes. The authors use this variability to reinforce their view that the management of content coverage, including association time allocation, is among the m...
Book Chapter
The Role of Teacher Leadership in Science Education
Professional development activities deepen content knowledge, support inquiry-based teaching, help teachers tap into student thinking, and assist in implementing curriculum materials and interpreting assessment systems. This chapter examines teachers...
Book Chapter
Getting Results From Science Teacher Leadership: The Critical Role of Principals
There is growing evidence that teacher leaders and principals are indeed effecting-and perhaps-essential allies in leading schoolwide improvement in teacher effectiveness and student learning. This chapter opens with a detailed look at the empirical ...
Book Chapter
Developing and Sustaining Leadership in Science Education
It can be argued that the most important guiding force leading to a teacher’s continued improvement is having a good role model, such as a colleague who is an experienced leader. This chapter provides a detailed description of a master’s degree p...
Book Chapter
Technology Leadership for the 21st Century
This chapter addresses (a) how transformational leadership in the educational community is crucial for effective and appropriate infusion of educational technology as a fundamental part of K-12 education; (b) how educational leaders can create a robu...
NSTA Press Book
Reforming Secondary Science Instruction
Science education reform can seem a daunting task to high school science teachers. So, you might ask, why should I be bothered? The answer is that today’s students simply do not have the skill sets necessary for life in our global economy. ...
Book Chapter
Change in Secondary Science Settings: A Voice From the Field
Learning science by inquiry is central to science education reforms. In today’s working world, students need skills for finding, organizing, and managing information. They also need rich skills for working with others and for communicating orally a...
Journal Article
Science Sampler: Making a leap toward concrete inferences
Scientists are always working at refining their observations to help them make that leap toward stronger inferences. Teaching students to make inferences means showing them how to take their careful observations and use them to explain natural phenom...
Journal Article
With the use of technology such as Global Positioning System (GPS) units and Google Earth for a simple-machine scavenger hunt, you will transform a standard identification activity into an exciting learning experience that motivates students, incorpo...
Journal Article
Science 101: Do plants communicate?
Oh yes. Sometimes their conversation is flowery, sometimes not. Plants with problems try to converse and get to the root of the problem, but if not, they have been known to stalk one another. This often creates a situation where one plant leaves town...
Journal Article
The Prepared Practitioner: Brain-Based Education
Brain-based is an increasingly popular buzzword in educational circles. Brain research promises to take teaching from (supposedly) mere craft knowledge to a scientifically based realm from which researchers can make broadly applicable, objective conc...
Journal Article
When it comes to directly interacting with and doing experiments with organisms, plants have some distinct advantages over animals. Their diversity and accessibility allows students to use them in experiments, thus practicing important science inquir...
Journal Article
Science Shorts: Hypothesis Testing—It’s Okay to Be Wrong
Students often seek affirmation from their teachers about their thinking and can be embarrassed at the thought of being “wrong.” In science, we want children to feel comfortable making hypotheses and to know that it’s the investigative process�...
Journal Article
Science Sampler: Using seashells to teach classification
Everyone loves the beach. Unfortunately, most schools don’t have access to beachfront property. So, why not bring the beach to the classroom? This seashell lab investigation is great because students enjoy it, they learn that science is a way to so...
Journal Article
From Cookbook to Experimental Design
Developing expertise, whether from cook to chef or from student to scientist, occurs over time and requires encouragement, guidance, and support. One key goal of an elementary science program should be to move students toward expertise in their abili...
Journal Article
Editor’s Corner: Renaissance Thinking
Although it may be an old-school habit of mind with roots in the Renaissance, interdisciplinary thinking has never been more important than in the modern world. In their daily lives, our students will need to understand complex problems and evaluate ...
Journal Article
Biological Clocks and Circadian Rhythms
The study of biological clocks and circadian rhythms is an excellent way to address the inquiry strand in the National Science Education Standards (NSES) (NRC 1996). Students can study these everyday phenomena by designing experiments, gathering and ...
Journal Article
The Potential da Vinci in All of Us
The study of the human form is fundamental to both science and art curricula. For vertebrates, perhaps no feature is more important than the skeleton to determine observable form and function. As Leonard da Vinci’s famous Proportions of the Human F...
Journal Article
Tried and True: Chipping away at the rock cycle
The National Science Education Standards recommend that middle school students have a clear understanding of the history, composition, and formative processes that shape the Earth. To accomplish this goal, the authors use an engaging activity that us...
Journal Article
Why not combine the use of technology with the excitement of a scavenger hunt that moves middle-level students out into the “wilds” of their school campus to classify plants? In the lesson plan described here, students embark on a botanical scav...
Book Chapter
Building a Culture of Faculty-Owned Assessment
With so much at stake for both students and institutions, it is imperative that colleges and universities support faculty and others in comprehensive assessment efforts and act on changes suggested by assessment data. If higher education is to mainta...