STRETCHING OURSELVES BEYOND SIMPLY RUNNING WORKSHOPS: AN INTEGRATED MODEL OF PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

The science community's past decade of participation in science teacher professional development (PD) has provided the science community with extensive experience and skill at working with science educators. Further, such experience has fostered a culture of interest and awareness in science education among its members. These developments, combined with an increase in the understanding of how to support and encourage teachers to use reform oriented practices in their instruction, creates the potential for the science community to influence classroom science instruction as never before. To achieve this potential the community must examine the model of offering PD opportunities mainly at professional meetings or as special events at colleges where they are largely unconnected to the daily practice of teachers. Such PD tends to be limited in duration and tends to attract savvy teachers with a natural inclination to participate in growth opportunities. The next decade of the science community's efforts to further the science education reform movement must leverage the expertise of the growing population of science education specialists and work in a more integrated fashion with the education community.

As an example, the IRIS Consortium has collaborated with Yuma Union High School District, AZ since 2004 to develop and implement PD for all teachers teaching any sections of Earth science. The result has been an integrated model of PD that is substantially different from previous IRIS PD efforts and has positively impacted the district. The integrated model of PD is:

• constructed with the explicit purpose of generating a perceptible change in student knowledge and skill,

• customized in partnership with a school district/region to recognize the distinctiveness of each school setting,

• focused on enhancing both teacher content and pedagogical content knowledge as a means of effecting change in classroom practice,

• extending the duration of both interaction time, and span in which interactions take place, by including other forms of PD,

• relevant and coherent for teachers as a result of alignment with the district's mission and vision and integrated into the larger picture of the school's improvement plan,

• able to reach a more diverse population of teachers, and

• a model that allows cost sharing between the district and the science organization.