Our Mission/Goals/Vision
Support teachers in engaging students in authentic scientific inquiry and sense-making - making self-directed explorations and observation of natural phenomena, finding questions to explore, devising ways of gathering, organizing and displaying data - and create a community of science learners in the classroom.
- Collaborate with teachers to devise ways to assess, document and make student thinking visible for the purpose of devising experiences to sustain student engagement and support students in their own learning.
- Engage teachers as researchers of students' science learning for the purpose of building teachers' capacities and confidence in teaching science.
- Engage teachers in doing what scientists do to enhance their capacities to introduce scientific practices into the experiences of their students and improve their knowledge and vision of science as a field of study.
- Create a forum for teachers to share and explore experiences with inquiry in their classrooms.
Inquiry-based teaching and learning engages both students and teachers as researchers of natural phenomena.
Students explore and research materials and scientific phenomena their teachers present to them. Students gain knowledge and understanding of scientific phenomena and develop the practices and habits of mind of contemporary scientists as they make self-directed explorations, doing what scientist do (observing, classifying, modeling, experimenting).
Teachers explore and research their students' self-directed science learning. Teachers become facilitators of learning and knowing rather than transmitters of information.
Students and teachers are observers, questioners, explorer, inquirers, data gatherers, thinkers, sense-makers, imaginers, innovators, inventers, creators, collaborators, communicators. Classrooms are transformed into places of deep learning as students and teachers work together, co-constructing knowledge, as a scientific learning community. Such environments of deep learning nurture the ways of thinking and interacting necessary for successful engagement with a rapidly changing, increasingly diverse unknowable and unpredictable world.