Collaborative Research: Hearing Each Other's Voices: Community Models for Professional Learning for Teachers, STEM Coaches, and Researchers

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A long-standing challenge for education and learning sciences is sharing the distinct knowledge bases of researchers and teachers with each other. The goal of this project is to support teachers, STEM coaches, and researchers in sharing that knowledge so that they can learn from one another. The STEM coaches work with teachers and are focused on science and technology in the schools. They will also serve to connect K-12 schools and researchers, and will play a critical role in bridging between the teachers and researchers. Ultimately, a professional learning community will be created to bring the three groups together. One purpose of the learning community will be to select and adapt research-based practices that address local changes. The learning community will also work together to create research-practice briefs that are short written summaries of research that provides useable knowledge and guidance for teaching and learning. An important contribution is creating research-practice briefs that summarize research with input from both researchers and practitioners so that principled adaptations can be applied more easily in practice. The project takes a sociocultural perspective using cultural historical activity theory to analyze the interactions that will occur between researchers, teachers, and STEM coaches. The research questions are as follows. First, how can researchers and STEM coaches jointly construct products that support their learning and knowledge diffusion? Second, how do STEM coaches help teachers adapt practices to their classrooms? Third, what contextual factors support or impede the adoption of research-based practices? While answering these questions, the project will incorporate the perspectives of STEM coaches, teachers, and researchers and work to understand how this new professional learning community model can work within school and district contexts. The research and development plan will use a mixed methods approach using observational data (e.g., field notes, video), written artifacts, and interviews to understand the different interacting systems within the new expansive learning community. The Discovery Research preK-12 program (DRK-12) seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models, and tools. Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.