With a recent grant from Boeing, the Meaningful Science Consortium (MSC) is developing an enhanced lesson planning tool and leadership development workshops for the Chicago public high schools that use its science curriculum. MSC provides a three-year sequence of course work to prepare students for college-level science, along with teacher professional development.
With prior support from Boeing, MSC developed an online lesson-planning tool that allows teachers to customize the organization and pacing of lessons in the curriculum. The new enhancement will help principals to monitor teachers’ adaptations of the curriculum. Chicago public schools using the MSC curriculum have higher-than-average numbers of inexperienced teachers, and frequently these teachers must make adjustments to the curriculum to address student difficulties.
New reporting tools will help principals to answer these questions: Are teachers maintaining the same standards as the model curriculum? Are teachers maintaining the same overall level of academic rigor as the model curriculum? Are the teachers implementing the standards in adapted learning activities and embedded assessments at the same level of rigor as the model lessons?
“The primary objective is to increase teachers’ capacity to customize the MSC curriculum to meet the needs of their students while maintaining high standards,” according to Steven McGee, director of the Meaningful Science Consortium at the School of Education and Social Policy. “The secondary objective, which supports the primary objective, is to increase principals’ and assistant principals’ capacity to monitor and provide feedback to teachers on their curriculum implementations.”
On an annual basis, MSC reaches 75 high school science teachers and nine to 18 high school administrators. These teachers and administrators serve approximately 6,500 students.
Three MSC high schools will engage in the development process with MSC. At Hancock, Gage Park and Farragut high schools, administrators will participate in interviews to assess needs, and teachers will participate in focus groups to determine how to make the lesson planning tool more valuable. Information gleaned from the interviews and focus groups will be used for developing prototypes of the teacher and principal reporting tools.
All MSC schools will also be able to participate in leadership workshops developed at the School of Education and Social Policy. Leadership workshops will be customized to meet their needs.
The foundation of Northwestern University’s Meaningful Science Consortium is that students learn best when they see a purpose for what they are learning. Throughout the three-year MSC sequence, students conduct projects in all five of the major science disciplines — environmental science, Earth science, physics, chemistry and biology. Each project has been carefully crafted to engage students in inquiry and to address key scientific concepts in the context of robust reasoning about real-world problems. Research has shown that through project-based work, students can increase their conceptual understanding of academic standards while developing analysis skills required for college readiness.