Report
“CONNECT-ED provides an altogether different version of practice-based professional development.”
“The power of C-E lies in providing teachers with the opportunity, the support, and the appropriate resources to explore the big ideas and to understand where and how they might appear in the curriculum as students move through the grades.”
“The challenge of CONNECT-ED was to make…forays into some of science’s big ideas sufficiently accessible and compelling that teachers could grasp the idea and put it to work in their own instruction. Even more to the point, CONNECT-ED aims to inspire participating teachers to look to big ideas in their science instruction, not just in terms of the ideas covered at the institute, but in terms of other concepts covered in their curriculum as well. Taking individual activities as an occasion to think about big ideas (and to shape or reshape instruction accordingly) is not just good professional development; it’s the core of good teaching.”
“The pilot project required extraordinary conceptual focus, organizational commitment, and flexible response to succeed in achieving its major goals. [It]… met all of these requirements and added one important feature—the love of science and science education that were evident at every step.”
“CONNECT-ED succeeded at providing access to new content and new ways of looking at content, it tied this content, quite directly, to curriculum and instruction and it created a vehicle for sharing instructional ideas with other teachers.”
About the 1-week CON-QUEST Summer Institute
"The institute got it just right in terms of the marriage of content and pedagogy."
"It is unusual to see gains as deep and broadly distributed as those from CON-QUEST."
"Results of the content assessment were really quite dramatic and say a lot about the overall benefits of CON-QUEST."
About Design Team Leadership and BIM Design
“…a powerful professional development experience.”
“[Even with the complexities of the design process], design teams ‘got it’.”
“[Members] would recommend [the experience] to their colleagues.”
“BIMs showed careful planning, collective command of the design team’s big idea.”
“BIMs were of high quality in terms of their science content.”
