Co-Designing District-Wide STEM Curriculum

Seattle & Renton, Washington

A new vision for K-12 STEM education, and the resulting educational standards, emphasize the benefits of engaging students in authentic experiences of STEM practices around real-world, compelling investigations. This shift involves a complex set of changes to teaching and educational systems, one that requires deep, nuanced collaboration between research and practice.

Through the Research + Practice Collaboratory, researchers from the University of Washington Institute for Science + Math Education are working with the Seattle and Renton School Districts as they implement the Next Generation Science Standards.

This initiative has two central goals:

• Support implementation of practice-focused instruction in classrooms throughout the districts.
• Develop lines of design research to support and study implementation of this new vision for STEM education.

Work done at these sites brings together practitioners – teachers, instructional coaches, district-level staff – and educational researchers. Participants collaboratively adapt and refine curriculum that engages students in the STEM practices of explanation, argumentation, modeling and engineering design. As the materials are used, researchers and practitioners collaborate to identify existing problems of educational practice and then develop and refine new instructional approaches and resources to support improvement. This on-the-ground work informs and is informed by Inquiry Groups that facilitate cultural exchanges between practitioners and researchers about problems of practice and associated improvement strategies.

One product of this effort is a collection of bite-size professional learning resources for practitioners called STEM Teaching Tools, which are designed to help educators implement specific aspects of the new vision.

Contact the UW Institute for Science + Math Education team at ismeinfo@uw.edu.

Read the case study here.