Thanks, Katherine! The course showcases strategies teachers can use to uncover students’ ideas and help push students toward deeper scientific understanding of phenomena.

Yes, Sally, our projects are highly complementary! Our EMAT course does include a life science context. Using data from NREL and GLBRC, teachers can track energy and matter flows in the production and use of biofuels. Teachers examine the relative efficiency of corn grain, corn stover, and switchgrass as sources of biofuel.

Thanks for stopping by, Deborah. We made a concerted effort to put crosscutting energy concepts at the forefront. We found that teachers had a very difficult time articulating connections between everyday phenomena and key energy ideas.

Thanks for your question, Sarah. There are several challenges with online vs. in-person professional development (PD). In our face-to-face lesson analysis PD, teachers develop trust fairly quickly and are more willing to be open to sharing their own videos with other teachers and critiquing each others’ videos. In EMAT, we had to move away from using the participating teachers’ own videos. In spite of discussion groups and online synchronous discussions, we were unable to develop the necessary level of trust. Instead, we had teachers analyze videos of teachers not participating in the course.

Another important difference between face-to-face and online PD was in the length and intensity of discussions. Our face-to-face lesson analysis discussions (for another project) would last 3-4 hours. We did not think we would be able to get teachers to participate in an online discussion for that length of time. As a result, the lesson analysis discussions online were just 2 hours each, and tended to be shallower than what we have found in face-to-face PD.

Interesting! And consistent with our experience with online vs face-to-face PD. As a developer/facilitator I found teachers were okay with positive, supportive critique and comments and needed coaching to ask probing (that might be interpreted as critical) questions or to offer contradictory evidence! This was true online or face to face but I’d agree that changing the culture can happen faster face to face.

Yes, coaching teachers to provide evidence-based critiques of their colleagues’ videos is a huge component of our lesson analysis work (both face-to-face and online). We just weren’t very successful in getting critiques in the online format! I’d be very interested in hearing of successful online coaching strategies to help teachers feel comfortable making evidence-based critiques of videos (when they have only met their colleagues online).

Hi Kelly, thanks for your question. We measured teacher content knowledge, teachers’ ability to analyze video, and teacher practice. We also measured student content knowledge. We developed the teacher and student content measures specifically for the EMAT project. For teachers’ ability to analyze video, we used Kathy Roth’s prompt and scoring rubric from her STeLLA work (see Roth et al., 2011 in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching). For teacher practice, we had teachers film a lesson in the year prior to their participation in EMAT and another lesson in the year following their participation in EMAT. Kathy Roth and I developed a scoring rubric to analyze teaching practice aligned with the STeLLA strategies. There is a lot more detail in the paper that we have attached to this video presentation if you are interested in learning more, and please let me know if you have any more questions.

Joni, thanks for your question. The EMAT course is first and foremost a professional development course. The resources are geared to support high school teachers in deepening their understanding of key energy concepts and enhancing their ability to teach key energy concepts. We have an agreement with the National Teachers Enhancement Network at Montana State University for them to offer the course for 3 graduate credits on a rolling basis. That said, we also have plans to release the full course in August so that teachers can work through it (in part or in whole) individually or with professional learning communities. This non-facilitated version will be available free of charge to teachers and districts. We will also be providing a facilitation guide to support teacher leaders as they lead a PLC through the EMAT course. Finally, we found that many of our participating teachers thought that the animations and interactive learning experiences were useful as stand-alone elements for their high school students. The media resources will be freely available to be used in that manner, but we are hoping (sometime in the future) to develop some student materials to wrap the animations and interactives into coherent mini-lessons.

Thanks, Teresa! Our NARST paper is linked above. Please let me know if you would like any further information.