EXPERIENCE SCIENCE

A driving question begins each unit and learning set, and students connect phenomena to their local community and develop artifacts aligned with Performance Expectations to provide solutions.

Instead of answering “what” questions with a single response, we challenged students to wonder “how” and “why,” providing opportunities to apply the new information they’ve learned.

Professional development is at the heart of the Collaborate Science curriculum. Immersive and sustained, it recognizes the need for the teacher’s role to shift into a facilitator of the student discovery experience. Your professional learning with Collaborate Science is led by the driving question: how can we create a learner-centered classroom through projects? Collaborate Science supports a new way of teaching and learning.

Adults learn best by engaging in a similar experience as their students. Teachers wear “student” hats as they engage in an abridged set of lessons that leverage the curriculum features, experiencing first-hand how learning will unfold in their classrooms and how to apply project-based learning teaching pedagogy.

Integrating multiple literacies – such as communication, argumentation, design, and presentation – engages students in real-life scientific disciplines as they practice making sense of ideas and phenomena. Team projects allow students to work together, share their ideas, and practice providing and accepting feedback. As students share individual prior knowledge, it enriches the active, group learning experience. Collaborate Science supports a comprehensive learning experience, transforming the classroom into the next generation of problem solvers and doers.

Collaborate Science enables students to actively engage in their learning as they make choices and decisions. Each project promotes student understanding of concepts and skills and serves as a performance-based assessment. These projects are the core of the academic work, developing student understanding of key concepts and skills through the process.

Driving questions provide a roadmap for students to follow as they investigate solutions, and the classroom becomes a workshop – teams of students produce “things,” test their hypothesis, solve problems together, and critique their team’s work. The culminating projects demonstrate what individual students have learned, the content or skills they are struggling with, and where there are gaps for teachers to address. This curriculum structure naturally leads to differentiated instruction, while the hands-on, synergetic experience lets students do science, not just read about it.