Instructional leadership for scientific practices: Resources for principals in evaluating and supporting teachers' science instruction

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Although K-8 principals are responsible for instructional improvement across all subject areas, their focus has traditionally been on literacy and mathematics and only occasionally on science content and practice. New standards and assessments in science require that principals and other instructional leaders provide significant support to teachers to help them successfully integrate scientific practices into their instruction. There is evidence that these instructional leaders often lack the knowledge, resources or skills to provide this support. This project will research the knowledge and supervision skills principals' and other instructional leaders' need to support teachers in successfully integrating scientific practices into their instruction, and develop innovative resources to support these leaders with a particular focus on high-minority, urban schools. The project will contribute to the emerging but limited literature on instructional leadership in science at the K-8 school level. The resources developed will involve: (1) Introducing scientific practices (including rationales, descriptions and vignettes illustrating each of the 8 scientific practices); (2) Using tools in schools (providing an observation protocol, teacher feedback form and improvement planning template); and (3) Analyzing sample video (including links to video of K-8 science instruction, completed supervision tools, explanations of their coding, and discussion of how to use them with teachers). The project will conduct in-depth interviews with four principals, work with 25 principals in the Boston Public Schools to iteratively design and test the resources. The project will also develop a measure of Leadership Content Knowledge of Scientific Practices (LCK-SP) which will be used to assess principals' knowledge. The project's research component will: (1) investigate principals' current knowledge about scientific practices and methods for supervision of science instruction; and (2) examine how resources can be designed to support instructional leaders' content knowledge of scientific practices.