Portfolio and Sample Artifacts
Artifacts are in Green

Principled Procedures for Science Curriculum Decision Making and Possible Artifacts to Demonstrate Competency

Pedagogical Principled Procedures
1. Teachers plan alone and with colleagues within and across disciplines and grade levels. They plan inquiry-based science programs for students by developing yearly and shorter term plans with students based on their interests, knowledge, understanding, abilities, and experiences. They select educational and assessment strategies to support student's development of science understandings in a nurturing community of science learners.
  • Interest inventories
  • Misconception activities
  • Research articles or notes about children and science
  • Year plan with appropriate concepts and activities
  • Diagnostic assessments
  • Activities and assessment that are developmentally appropriate
  • Student self assessments
  • Activities that start with open student participation
  • Cooperative learning and open student discussion
  • Video tapes and reflections that
  • Recognize students' differences and intervene with appropriate interactions
  • Give students choice
  • Create risk free environments
2. Teachers facilitate learning by modeling skills of scientific inquiry and attitudes such as curiosity, openness to new ideas and data, and skepticism in their interactions with students to show students how to focus inquires and discourse about scientific ideas and challenge them to accept responsibility and full participation for their understanding of science.
  • Videos and or reflections that show teacher modeling or teacher facilitated
  • Curiosity
  • Open-mindedness to new ideas
  • Desire for novel, diverse, and multiple solutions
  • time to think, time to solve problems, and personal ownership of ideas and problems.
  • Searching for and desire opportunities to learn
3. Teachers assess their teaching. They continually and systematically gather data of their teaching actions and in-actions from personal, student, and colleague observations. They inquire, analyze, reflect on the data, and draw conclusions to guide future actions and in-actions to improve students' understanding and ability.
  • Personal reflections
  • Critiques from peer teachers, cooperative teachers, administrators
  • Student evaluations
  • Video tapes
  • Rationales for teaching select concepts
  • Interviews with students about what they learned
4. Teachers assess students. They continually and systematically gather data on students through multiple methods with their own, students and colleagues’ observations of students’ actions and in-actions as they relate to their understandings. They analyze the information alone, with students, and colleagues and make recommendations to help students set and achieve goals, assess them, and report their progress to teachers, parents, and other interested people.
  • Rubrics designed for teacher and/or student assessments
  • Parent letters
  • Newsletters
  • Assessment plans for collecting student data to share with students, parents, and /or administrators to see growth.
  • Reports, checksheets…
  • Activities students do at home or outside of class
  • Plans that have good diagnostic, formative, summative, and generative assessment.
5. Teachers design and manage learning environments with students so that time is available for safe extended meaningful investigations to help students learn scientific inquiry methods with a variety of tools in a variety of environments. In a manner that also nurtures positive dispositions and conceptual understandings of science content and perspectives of science by all students.
  • Plans that include steps where students are given time to explore, categorize, construct, negotiate, assess, reflect, translate, and extend
  • Activities, videos, student journals, that show students know how scientists investigate and examples of them experimenting and communicating as scientists
  • Examples of student notebooks, lab books, science fair projects, activity records that show a diverse sample of science investigations, uses of a variety of processes, positive dispositions, and accurate perspectives of science
  • Curriculum plans where students are given opportunities to create understandings in all the dimensions of science
  • Philosophy with strong statements for the inclusion of all dimensions in science
  • Lesson plans with plenty of opportunities and time for students to discuss what and how to investigate and process not only the data, reasoning, and conclusions after the experiment, but to critique the experiment's design and investigation to suggest how it might be improved or adapted for later investigations and the affect the investigation and outcomes might have on themselves, science, and society
6. Teachers develop communities of science learners that reflect the intellectual rigor of scientific inquiry and the attitudes and social values conducive to science learning by requiring respect for diverse ideas, skills, and experiences of all students. Allow students to make decisions about the content and context of their work. Require students to take responsibility for the learning of all members of the community by nurturing collaboration among students, structuring experiences to help students increase theirs and others scientific communication abilities, and appreciation for the skills, attitudes, and values of scientific inquiry.
  • Plans that include steps where students are given time to explore, categorize, construct, negotiate, assess, reflect, translate, and extend
  • Activities, videos, student journals, that show students know how scientists investigate and examples of them experimenting and communicating as scientists.
  • Examples of student notebooks, lab books, science fair projects, activity records
  • Curriculum plans where students are given opportunities to ask their own questions, design experiments, carry them out, and report their findings; science fairs, challenge days; KWHL charts
  • Philosophy paper with strong statements on this
  • Lesson plans with plenty of opportunities and time for students to discuss what and how to investigate and process not only the data, reasoning, and conclusions after the experiment, but to critique the experiment's design and investigation to suggest how it might be improved or adapted for later investigations and the affect the investigation and outcomes might have on themselves, science, and society
Professional Principled Procedures
1. Teachers actively participate in the development of a K-12 school science program through truly democratic means that seek appropriate allocation of time, resources for planning and implementing a science program, professional development, and ongoing program evaluation.
  • Philosophy includes statements about how to grow professionally
  • Evidence of attendance at professional conferences, memberships
  • Parent nights samples
  • Newsletters
  • Evidence of curriculum meeting participation
2. Teachers actively investigate and reflect on science topics that are significant to the participants in the science field; using scientific methods to expand the teacher's science knowledge and ability to generate further knowledge while at the same time understand different perspectives of science and maintain positive attitudes towards science.
  • Investigation notebook, journal with samples of personal investigations as a scientist
3. Teachers integrate knowledge of science, learning, pedagogy, and students so that science learning can be integrated with all aspects of science, different disciplines, and generalized to a variety of real life situations.
  • Year plan activities will incorporate all dimensions of learnings and how they relate to each other and the real world
  • Plans that integrate different subjects or integration beyond subject.
4. Teachers develop professionally alone and with colleagues an appreciation for lifelong learning and professional development through research and experiential knowledge to validate and generate new knowledge about how students learn science and teachers can facilitate that learning.
  • Evidence of conferences attended
  • Workshops attended
  • Classes taken
  • Attending science centers, science fairs
  • Personal science log
  • List of personal readings
  • Philosophy

Dr. Robert Sweetland's Notes ©