Ambitious Science Teaching (AST) Virtual Book Study SY 24-25

Instructor(s): Peney E. Wright 
Description of Activity: 

Tier 2 Virtual Professional learning. Please see prerequisites below. 
A copy of the Ambitious Science Teaching (AST) book is available at your school district’s STEELS Resource Library. Limited copies are available through TIU’s Lending Library. 
PDE and PSU’s Ambitious Responsive Science Education (PARSE) collaborative universities team recommend AST as a foundational guide for the transition to STEELS. 

FREE and 65 hours of Act 48 credit 

We’ll be using Google Classroom to organize all sessions and participant sharings.

What is Ambitious Science Teaching ? 
Ambitious teaching can be learned. Ambitious Science Teaching supports students in tackling authentic and meaningful science phenomena with attention to students’ histories, social interactions, and local and global communities. Ambitious teaching requires that teachers develop deep commitments to student learning and a historical understanding of inequity in science and schools. Ambitious teaching takes practice. This research and website provides resources to develop a vision of ambitious science instruction for today’s complex K-12 classrooms, professional learning, and teacher education. 

Questions to ask: 
How is science done? 
What counts as science? 
Who gets to do science? 

The Vision of Ambitious Science Teaching 
The ambitious teacher “works with students’ ideas” over time. What would you experience in classrooms where ambitious teaching was the focus? You would see and hear: 

•  Teachers anchoring their instruction in complex and puzzling phenomena that are meaningful and relevant to learners. Teachers design science experiences so that science aims for justice and creates space for joy. 
•  Students engaging in multiple rounds of creating and revising scientific models, explanations, and evidence-based arguments, expanding ideas over time.  
•  Teachers use a variety of discourse strategies with students to get them to think deeply and respond to each other’s thinking about phenomena, ideas, and multiple perspectives.
•  Students prompt each other to engage in sense-making talk during investigations and other activities because students are working to learn from each other’s perspectives.
•  Students’ ideas being represented publicly and worked on by the class as a collective science learning community.  
•    Teachers use a variety of discourse strategies to support students in responding to one another’s thinking, build collaborative explanations, and broadly address issues of power and positionality in the classroom and science. 
• Students using evidence to advocate for justice-centered uses of science based on multiple perspectives, ideas, and questions that have broadened over time. 
•  Students reflect on how they learned and how they broadened what it means to participate in science together.  

Participants will read chapters and sometimes watch a video before attending a 90-minute interactive virtual session every 2-3 weeks. Sessions will be recorded in the event that a participant needs to miss one or two sessions. Collaboration with peers is essential as we make these shifts to STEELS. Attendees will apply concepts, strategies and tools within their classrooms, aligning one Spring 2025 unit along the way. Act 48 hours will be granted for all three components. 

For a complete list of dates and topics, please click on Detailed Schedule for AST Virtual Book Study SY 24-25 .  Zoom link details also listed. 

Prerequisites: 
Completed at least one of the Tier 1 professional learning options: 

•  STEELS Experience for K-12 Educators
•  Or Implementing the STEELS Standards: Developing Science Leadership Teams 
•  ENGINE 3D STEELS Educators Community of Practice (CoP)
•  TIU 11 and District offered Introduction to STEELS 
   

Strongly recommended prerequisite: 
Read A Framework for K-12 Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts and Core Ideas (2021), free download This ground-breaking research is the foundation of STEELS.