CIPS Professional Development Project

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The intended three-year project will produce a robust Professional Development package for school districts to support the implementation of the middle school curriculum, "Constructing Ideas in Physical Science (CIPS)." The package will include a program to engage teachers in 120 hours of substantive professional development over a period of two years. The materials will consist of a weeklong "getting started" workshop to introduce teachers to CIPS, materials for seven follow-up workshops, a CIPS user's site and two CIPS discussion forums. The follow-up workshops address teachers' emergent needs during the first two years of teaching CIPS and introduce and support the use of the users site and forums. The latter will support web-based discussions about science teaching, student learning and physical science. The package will be developed by an experienced team of university physical science education researchers, middle school science teachers and other experts, and will be piloted and field tested at three large school systems throughout the United States. Project evaluation will include classroom observations for the purpose of monitoring teacher practice and student learning.