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My current projects have me spending a lot of time in various classroom spaces. I recently used Zoom to observe in middle and high school science classrooms in Illinois and New Jersey. I spent one day in Cañon City, CO where I visited every classroom in an elementary school with a team of researchers, educators, and community members. Another day, I attended a multi-tier system of support (MTSS) team meeting at a Boulder Valley School District middle school, and on yet another day, I observed language arts classes in an elementary and middle school in Greely, CO. I also recently sat in on a statistical collaboration class meeting at University of Colorado Boulder.

Each visit had its own purpose. For one project, we are thinking about how teachers take up new science curriculum to support students in thinking and acting like scientists. In another, we are serving as thought partners alongside district leadership in building and improving local accountability systems. In yet another project, we are studying effective ways of training interdisciplinary statistical collaborators. Although these projects are relatively disparate in nature, a theme that has come up repeatedly in one way or another are the ideas of student identity and belonging. As educators, we care that students see themselves as belonging in the school, classroom, and curriculum. We want students to see themselves as scientists, and we want students from all backgrounds and experiences to envision themselves in the same potential career spaces. This manifests itself when we characterize what it means to think and act like a scientist, the kinds of books we look for in classroom libraries and images on school walls, the ways students talk about themselves and their futures, and the verbiage we use for context in an assessment or survey question.

I’ve particularly enjoyed thinking about these ideas in my project involving secondary science teachers. On that project, our team provides science curricula and related professional development to help teachers navigate shifting their classroom practices to better encompass the Next Generation Science Standards. We’ve been studying the teachers’ moves that can provide more opportunities for students to have more authority and agency in the classroom and to think and act as scientists. Teachers can encourage students to share their ideas and tell students that their ideas are important for figuring out scientific ideas. However, simply inviting students to take up more authority in the classroom or telling them that their ideas matter doesn’t always convince students to participate, nor is it necessarily an authentic invitation. Sometimes when students share their ideas, the class moves in another direction. This can make students feel as though their ideas don’t actually matter, and they are simply playing school by searching for the “right” ideas to share when their teacher asks a question. This sort of inauthentic experience can happen for plenty of reasons. Perhaps the teacher is unsure about having students direct the class conversation. Maybe she doesn’t quite know how to create an environment where students follow their own noticing about scientific ideas to increased understanding about the world. It’s also possible that scheduling constraints don’t allow for that level of student engagement on a given day.

One thing we’ve found in our work is that the more teachers create spaces and opportunities for students to engage in thinking together as a class, the more reasons students have for engaging in knowledge-building about science ideas. When teachers ask students to make connections between their ideas or ask the class to make sense of two competing ideas that come from different students, they ask all students in the room to engage at a deeper level than simply looking for the “right” science answer. When students don’t agree about an idea and teachers invite students to share why they don’t agree or what causes them to be unconvinced, students think and act like scientists. The more teachers use differing student ideas as a catalyst for class conversation, the more students see their ideas and experiences as mattering. They can see themselves in the curriculum because the class centers around students sharing and making sense of their different ideas and lived experiences.

We’ve found that this idea of creating a space where students engage in a collective enterprise of understanding science ideas can lead to more buy-in from students and gives them more of a reason to participate and think and act like scientists. We’ve seen teachers using this approach to engage more students in whole class discussion and challenge students to consider a wider array of ideas. The pursuit of collective knowledge-building opens up space in the class for more students to see themselves and their ideas as integral to making sense of science ideas and the world around them.

At CADRE, our mission is to produce generalizable knowledge that improves the ability to assess student learning and to evaluate programs and methods that may have an effect on this learning. A large body of research suggests that students fare better when they have a sense of belonging or they can identify with their classrooms and schools. Research projects, such as the one discussed here, help stakeholders explore and understand the ways that curriculum and teaching practices address the ideas of identity and belonging and are one way that we at CADRE work to accomplish our mission.