Case Study: "Posey" Elementary School

In 2009, the Teacher Institute on Science and Sustainability was established, welcoming in its first cohort of approximately 30 educators, made up solely of San Francisco teachers. The following year, an enthusiastic teacher at Posey convinced her grade level colleague to apply with her to make the requisite teacher team; the two of them eventually became TISS’s first Oakland participants. Posey’s involvement was no fluke, though. The school’s principal at the time was dedicated to advancing science learning at Posey Elementary, as evidenced by the school’s annual field trips to Camp Royal in Livermore, a place where students could learn about sustainability. Fittingly, the original TISS coaching staff was also fully dedicated to preparing educators to teach about sustainable science. In their first year with TISS, the two Posey teachers spent their time learning about ways to build green buildings. At one of the workshops dedicated to this theme, Academy staff invited an architect who specialized in sustainable building to present to teachers.

Fueled by their newfound knowledge and supportive coaches, Posey’s initial cohort spent their first year in the program working to build lessons for their students based on the TISS workshops. They continued to teach FOSS curriculum just the same, but added green building projects to their science courses. The following year, the focus of the Teacher Institute’s professional development switched to sustainable eating, prompting these two Posey teachers to teach their students about the importance of eating locally. They took their students on field trips to farmers markets, began gardening in pots, ate what they grew, and produced brochures on how to eat sustainably. After graduating from TISS, the Posey teachers maintained their momentum, building planters in the schoolyard with the financial support of the school district, and encouraging other teachers to use this school garden as well. One TISS teacher’s students conducted studies on what was viable to grow in California’s climate, made charts to explain nutritional value of planted crops, measured light, developed watering and weeding schedules, and harvested food that year.

These two teachers were deeply impacted by these years of science professional development, by both the TISS program and the energy of the school surrounding science learning. They reported that the greatest shifts in their teaching occurred around:

• integrating sustainability content into their science curriculum,
• introducing science notebooks to facilitate more critical thinking and writing, and
• a shift from lecture-style teaching to more student autonomy and exploration.

Currently, one of these teachers is serving as a science coach for Oakland Unified School District. She reports using many lessons she learned from her TISS coach, especially the strategies of asking questions to induce reflection and providing her teachers with just as much positive as critical feedback. As of spring 2015, the second of those two teachers continues to teach at the same grade level and is currently helping prepare other teachers for the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). She commented, “If it wasn’t for TISS, I wouldn’t have had the confidence to apply” to serve on Oakland’s Science Instructional Reflection and Assessment team, on which she creates documents that offer advice on how to augment FOSS to support NGSS teaching.

Following the initial cohort of Posey teachers who participated in TISS from 2009-2011, the subsequent three years each welcomed a new pair of Posey teachers. For these teachers, the Teacher Institute was a very different experience, as the program transitioned away from its strong focus on sustainability and toward preparing its teachers to take on NGSS, specifically the NGSS Science Practices.

Posey’s second and third cohorts (TISS’s third and fourth, overall) did experience some sustainability exposure; for example, one TISS teacher recalls learning a lot about carbon footprints, sustainable food packaging, and producing commercials to promote sustainability. While reporting on how much they enjoyed these activities, these TISS graduates left the program with much less motivation to transplant the content of their TISS workshops into their classrooms, compared to previous cohorts. Instead, they worked to internalize the science teaching practices that TISS modeled during workshops and attempted to employ them spontaneously when opportunities arose during their lessons. For one teacher, he explained that he doesn’t alter his prescribed FOSS lesson plans significantly, but he is “more natural and spontaneous about putting science practices into lessons.” He believes that his students ask more questions now and argue from evidence more often, but he still feels that he should do a better job allowing students to work independently or design parts of their investigations.

At Posey, these years also saw the transition away from a science-focused school leader. Soon, the school’s subject focus became “balance literacy” to align within Oakland’s initiative to have school specializations. By 2015, as one teacher put it, “A lot of teachers don’t really teach much science.” The TISS teachers, while pressured to spend most of their energy on literacy, are still teaching science two to three times per week, which they suspect is much more than their colleagues.

When discussing the impacts TISS had on the ways they teach science, the middle cohortsreport minor impacts. For one teacher, science notebooks have been the largest change; he uses them to encourage more writing, thinking, and sketching. For the other teacher in that cohort, his biggest shift is the introduction of a larger purpose to each lesson, what he calls the “so what” portion of the lesson, which gives it meaning outside of a singular activity. But in general, these Posey educators teach the FOSS curriculum with little adaptation to the activities themselves, without adjusting the amount of student agency they allow.

While feeling that they have seen what strong science instruction looks like, these six teachers expressed how they are not implementing it as well as they could. They want to create larger, more meaningful science projects, like the ones they completed during TISS workshops. They want to spend more time adapting their FOSS lessons to allow for students to take on more agency in designing experiments. But because the atmosphere of the school has changed, they lack both the planning and teaching time to take on student-centered science, along with the peer support and coaching that make the process collaborative. In fact, science professional development meetings have stopped occurring at Posey. Most of the training is on balanced literacy, and with that has come the expectation that teachers focus their energy on literacy as well. For these middle cohorts, there is a suppressed energy around science; they know the requisite steps that would make their science instruction stronger, but they feel severe limitations in the current environment.

Despite Posey’s declining science focus, its current TISS cohort has been poised to improve their science teaching throughout their two years in the program. They continue to try new methods, adapt and enhance their FOSS curriculum, collaborate with each other, and pursue insights from earlier TISS graduates.

This latest cohort entered the TISS program in 2013 and experienced a coherent professional development program organized around five science teaching practices: asking questions, constructing explanations, arguing from evidence, planning and carrying out investigations, and analyzing data. Over the course of their two years of the program, these two teachers participated in workshops on each of those practices, after which coaches observed their teaching and facilitated reflective sessions with a clear, deliberate focus on those practices.

This latest team of teachers is proud of the progress they have made. Before teaching a science lesson, they consider which science practices best align with the activities and intentionally build out those aspects of the lesson to ensure that students are improving those essential science skills. One teacher also reported thinking through how much she can remove herself from the lesson to allow students to take over the critical thinking aspects of the investigation. Her partner teacher takes a similar approach, allowing her students to explore and guide investigations much more than before.

These motivated teachers report observable impacts on their students as a result of the shift in their science teaching. Their students appear more curious, trust their own judgment and intuition rather than depending on the teacher, and come away from science activities with a deeper understanding of the phenomena they were studying, rather than valuing the memorization of minor facts.

1. Overall, TISS teachers at Posey genuinely desire to implement student-centered science learning. Nearly every TISS teacher commented that they make sure to allow students time to play and experiment with materials, to make sense of them on their own in a more stress-free structure. They report that their students ask more of their own questions and spend more time on science discourse and groupwork. However, there is significant variation in the degree to which these teachers implement student-centered science, the chief limitation being a lack of time due to the school’s recent focus on literacy.
2. Teachers experienced markedly different TISS programming over the course of five years. Early cohorts gained more content knowledge (mostly around sustainability) that they attempted to bring directly back to their classrooms. Later cohorts gained more pedagogical tools for teaching within their current curriculum. As of now, there are no teachers who dedicate a significant amount of time to teaching sustainability as it is perceived as too unaligned with their curriculum, given their time constraints for teaching science.
3. School-wide culture or district priorities affect the freedom of TISS teachers to apply their learning. As part of the Oakland Unified School District, Posey is dominated by its focus on “balanced literacy,” creating an environment in which all other subjects have been deprioritized. The most recent TISS participants continue to focus a significant amount of energy planning and teaching student-centered science. Less recent cohorts teach the FOSS curriculum in a mostly scripted fashion with some alterations to meet student needs or increase student agency. Non-TISS teachers at the school teach very little science.
4. Collaboration around science teaching occurs mainly between teachers in the same cohort during their two years of TISS participation. Following those years, teachers revert to teaching science in a mostly-isolated fashion. Teachers cited three main causes for this lack of collaboration: diminished teaching time for science due to “balanced literacy,” a complete absence of school-wide science professional development, and the lack of a facilitator/champion to encourage teachers to collaborate around science.
5. All TISS teachers, current and former, continue to use science notebooks with their students, typically using a method of organization that closely resembles the TISS model. Notebooks are the most visible and enduring impact of the TISS program and they continue to serve the function of encouraging students to produce critical thinking, writing, and sketching within the structure of the scientific method.

Over the past five years, Posey Elementary has consistently evolved. As a case study, it offers valuable insights into a modern urban school facing very typical pressures from district and federal policies, in addition to changing leadership with shifting priorities.

In analyzing the experiences of TISS teachers at Posey, it is readily apparent that TISS has instilled (or at least maintained) a deep motivation for improving science teaching practice, especially during each teacher’s two-year program stint. Upon graduating, alumni feel that they are not given the time and space to be able to actively improve their science instruction, but they do consistently teach science, unlike their non-TISS colleagues.

In order to encourage continual reflection, collaboration, and improvement, it seems that some continued interaction between TISS and its graduates could be useful. For example, this could take the form of a refresher on ways to encourage high-level science notebook use or merely a space to check in with peers about challenges and innovations within their science instruction. As the past seven years have shown, TISS is capable of generating creative solutions to meet rising needs. Building systems to facilitate more long-term growth and school-wide penetration could be a useful expenditure of TISS thought and energy.