The recent release of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) offers a new challenge and opportunity for science. Science practices are the social interactions, tools and language that scientist use as they construct, evaluate and communicate scientific knowledge. The effective integration of science practices into classrooms can better support a wide range of students, including those typically underrepresented in science, to develop greater scientific literacy.
Effective integration of science practices in classrooms requires instructional leadership to support that change. Instructional leaders can include a variety of different individuals including, but not limited to, school principals, district leaders, coaches and lead teachers. The ILSP team is developing tools to support instructional leaders in the science practices.
Vision
Our vision for supporting instructional leaders in their work with teachers to improve science teaching and learning stems from our approach to instructional supervision and science instruction.
Our orientation to supervision is rooted in the importance of strong instructional leadership. We seek to support leaders in their work with teachers as they promote a growth mindset, foster frequent and ongoing opportunities for feedback, sustain a commitment to teacher development over time, and engage in collaborative practices.
Computer science as a field requires curricular guidance, as new innovations are filtered into teaching its knowledge areas at a rapid pace. Furthermore, another trend is the growing number of students with different cultural backgrounds. These developments require taking into account both the differences in learning styles and teaching methods in practice in the development of curricular knowledge areas. In this paper, an intensive collaborative teaching concept, Code Camp, is utilized to illustrate the effect of learning styles on the success of a course. Code Camp teaching concept promotes collaborative learning and multiple skills and knowledge in a single course context. The results indicate that Code Camp as a concept is well liked, increases motivation to learn and is suitable for both intuitive and reflective learners. Furthermore, it appears to provide interesting creative challenges and pushes students to collaborate and work as a team. In particular, the concept also promotes intuition.
The Go-Lab Project (Global Online Science Labs for Inquiry Learning at School) opens up online science laboratories (remote and virtual labs) for the large-scale use in school education. The overall aim of the project is to encourage young people aged from 10 to 18 to engage in science topics, acquire scientific inquiry skills, and experience the culture of doing science by undertaking active guided experimentation.
To achieve this aim, the Go-Lab project creates the Go-Lab Portal allowing science teachers finding online labs and inquiry learning applications appropriate for their class, combining these in Inquiry Learning Spaces (ILSs) supporting particular lesson scenarios, and sharing the ILSs with their students. Using the ILSs, the students receive the opportunity to perform personalized scientific experiments with online labs in a structured learning environment.
B. Vogel, D. Spikol, A. Kurti, and M. Milrad. Proceedings of the 2010 6th IEEE International Conference on Wireless, Mobile, and Ubiquitous Technologies in Education, page 65--72. Washington, DC, USA, IEEE Computer Society, (2010)
K. Juuti, and J. Lavonen. NorDiNa, (2006)Construction of research based teaching sequences through Developmental research (Linsje, 1995), Educational reconstruction (Duit, Komorek & Wilbers, 1997), or Ingenierie Didactique (Artigue, 1994), can be considered very similar with design-based research. On the one hand, these approaches take into careful consideration students’ previous knowledge and emphasise basic scientific concepts and how they are related to the teaching sequence (Méhuet, 2004) and on another hand they aim to design the artefacts. For example, Andersson and Bach (2005) produced a teacher guide as an artefact describing the research-based sequence for teaching geometrical optics. However, these approaches focus on research-based design and the adoption of the innovations needs, for example, teachers’ in-service training.
(p 56).
A. Waraich. ITiCSE '04: Proceedings of the 9th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education, page 97-101. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2004)