CONNECT-ED: Professional Development in Science and Mathematics

CONNECT-ED Consortium Partners
Public School Districts
City of Burlington School District, Montgomery Township School District ,East Windsor Regional School District, Ewing Township School District, South Brunswick Public Schools, Hamilton Township Public Schools, Trenton Public Schools, Hillsborough Township School District, Watchung Hills Regional High School, Hopewell Valley Regional School District, Robbinsville School District, Lawrence Township Public Schools, West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional Schools

Independent School
The Newgrange School

Institutions of Higher Education
Rider University (lead institution)
Princeton University
Raritan Valley Community College

Industry
Bristol-Myers Squibb Company

Not-for-Profit Organization
LearningForward (formerly the National Staff Development Council)

How the partnership was formed. In 2000, Bristol-Myers Squibb Company provided a grant of $500,000 to Rider University to construct the Bristol-Myers Squibb Center for Science Teaching and Learning on Rider’s Lawrenceville campus. The 6,500 square foot center, which opened in 2002 as a hub for science education in the region, is designed specifically to support teaching and learning science by inquiry. Several area school districts, through their participation in the National Science Resources Center’s LASER initiative, were already receiving support from BMS to implement NSF-endorsed science curricula in their schools. At the same time, Princeton University approached Rider to suggest partnering in science education initiatives. Princeton, through its QUEST teacher professional development program, was also partnering with several area school districts. The event that galvanized the new, larger partnership among all these entities was the announcement in 2003 of the National Science Foundation’s Math & Science Partnership (MSP) Grant Program. In response to the announcement, Rider, Princeton, and BMS invited all the districts in the region to convene to hear about a draft of the CONNECT-ED model for teacher professional development. From that initial group, 14 districts and 2 private schools signed up for three work sessions to refine the model which was then proposed to the NSF’s MSP program. Although NSF declined funding (in both the first and second rounds), the result for us was a new partnership committed for the long term to science/math professional development for teachers. In the absence of federal funding, we were successful in securing two local grants (3M and the NJDOE) to support the program’s pilot year (2003-04), and then leveraged the successful pilot to secure additional corporate and private foundation funding to scale up the project. In 2008, the Consortium sought a partner with expertise in teacher professional learning communities, and so invited LearningForward (formerly the National Staff Development Council/NSDC) into the partnership.

Partner roles and how the partnership functions. As described above, Rider University serves as CONNECT-ED’s lead institution and fiscal agent responsible for program development, administration, and fund raising. Rider also contributes science/math faculty who work with teacher teams. Princeton University contributes its QUEST teacher program and research faculty familiar with inquiry learning to work with QUEST and CONNECT-ED teacher teams. Raritan Valley CC contributes science faculty and access to its NJ Astronomy Center for Education. Bristol-Myers Squibb Company contributes its scientists and also provides substantial financial support. LearningForward provides expertise in staff development, in particular professional learning communities. School districts contribute expertise, facilitate their teachers’ participation, and share the cost of the program. District membership has remained relatively stable over 8 years, with current membership at 12 public school districts and 1 independent school.

As lead institution, Rider also provides staffing for CONNECT-ED. Two University-funded positions dedicate portions of their time to CONNECT-ED. Dr. Kathleen Browne, Academic Director of Rider’s Teaching & Learning Center and Director of Rider’s Science Education and Literacy Center (SELECT) serves as CONNECT-ED Project Director responsible for program development and implementation. Jean Kutcher, Administrative Director of Rider’s Teaching & Learning Center, is responsible for fund raising, grant administration, and general program administration. One grant-funded position, a part-time CONNECT-ED Project Manager (Carrie Tretola), is responsible for the day to day operation of the project. To ensure the project is always responsive to districts’ and teachers’ needs, CONNECT-ED staff maintain regular communication with the science or math supervisor in each partner district and convene occasional round tables or similar meetings of district leaders and teachers participating in the project.

In the 1996 report, What Matter Most: Teaching and America’s Future, the National Commission on Teaching and American’s Future (NCTAF) said, “...studies show that teacher expertise is the most important factor in student achievement” (p.6). This is why CONNECT-ED invests in teachers.

Teachers want their students to learn, not because they want good scores on high stakes tests, but because that’s why they became teachers in the first place (and why I myself have spent my entire career in education). What teachers need, rather than the next “trend du jour,” are opportunities for coherent, sustained professional learning that relates directly to their own science/math classroom practice and to their own students’ learning. The recent study, STEM Teachers in Professional Learning Communities: From Good Teachers to Great Teaching (WestEd and NCTAF, June 2011) begins with this stunning sentence: “STEM teaching is more effective and student achievement increases when teachers join forces to develop strong professional learning communities (PLCs) in their schools.”

Effective education accountability systems should ultimately tell us something about student learning. The focus of all PLC activity is precisely that – student learning. In CONNECT-ED PLCs, this focus is specifically on science and math learning. Toward this end, teachers in CONNECT-ED PLCs typically are involved in activities such as science and math lesson development, observation, and analysis, or looking at and analyzing student work – all for the purpose of adjusting their instruction to meet their students’ learning needs. In other words, teachers in CONNECT-ED PLCs are engaged in content- and data-driven professional conversations that keep them continually apprised of their students’ progress in science or math – what they understand, what they misunderstand, and what they still need to learn.
For example, an elementary teacher in a CONNECT-ED PLC asked PLC members to examine with her an assessment she had given her students at the end of a unit on rocks and minerals. She was concerned because scores were lower than she had expected based on these students’ past performance. After hearing about the lessons and activities the teacher had engaged her students in, and examining the assessment, PLC teachers analyzed students’ scores, question by question, to determine where student understanding was weak. This analysis and its related conversation involved some deep conversations about content, which helped clarify for the teacher which concepts students missed and therefore where she needed to focus her attention. PLC members also discussed instructional strategies that could be appropriate for this purpose.

In another example, a high school math teacher brought to a team meeting examples of student work for a lesson focused on the value of creating models from real data sets to experiment with variables and predict best outcomes when variables are controlled. Team colleagues from different grade levels along with a scientist and mathematician discussed key ideas that could be emphasized as well as some adjustments the teacher made to the lesson in order to better reveal the students' understanding of the key ideas. Central to both discussions was a deep understanding of the math content and key connections to science concepts.

If accountability is about ensuring that students learn, then PLC work in which teachers’ attention is focused on evidence of their students’ learning and on adjusting instruction accordingly is a highly effective means of accountability.

Although Phases I and II of CONNECT-ED were fully funded, we are still developing funding for Phase III (2012-14). In addition to operating costs, we hope to fund an intervention that serves as the basis for a controlled study to test the hypothesis that teacher professional development focused on concept connection-making in science/math improves student learning. Further, while CONNECT-ED has received local media attention, we hope to extend that regionally or nationally. And we always welcome – and need – exchanges with others in the field whose ideas push us past our own thinking. Those conversations invariably enrich the work.

Networking offers opportunities to exchange ideas and experience, and these exchanges often lead to new and mutually beneficial collaborations. We would welcome opportunities to share what we have learned from experience with others engaged in teacher professional development – or any other aspect of STEM teaching and learning K-16. In addition to Rider’s work with K-12 teachers, we also support a learning community of University science, math, and education faculty called the IDEAS Group who, for the past 10 years have been examining their own undergraduate instruction in an effort to engage students, in particular non-majors and those preparing to become elementary teachers, more fully in the science process. We can offer that venue for professional exchange as well.