PROMOTING COLLABORATIVE

INQUIRY PROJECTS THROUGH

PROFESSIONAL
DEVELOPMENT

One of the growing concerns

among many educational leaders in
K-12 education is the sheer
number of reforms that schools are
expected to implement. It is not
uncommon to hear of schools,
especially those in larger urban
centers, trying to implement a
dozen or more such efforts in a
given year. Schools and districts
are asked to modify schedules to fit
more minutes in the day or more
classes on the schedule, analyze
data to direct into school
improvement efforts and to address language, culture, and social issues with a rapidly changing
student body. Meanwhile, individual teachers are asked to collaborate with colleagues to create
unique student plans, implement new technologies, introduce new assessments, prepare students
for statewide assessments, differentiate learning for students, and employ new management and
literacy strategies, all while improving their own content knowledge and aligning instruction to state
and national content standards. And, of course, parents often say they want teachers to teach
“just like they were taught.”

While any of these efforts, in and of themselves, might offer significant improvements in the learning
or achievement of some students, they are incredibly hard to do together. The time constraints for
teachers to learn about these practices, let alone plan, implement, and reflect upon them, are
enough to cause many to want to just close their doors and teach just as they learned in their own
schooling. And, it is enough to cause some school districts to turn away grants and support to
implement these practices, no matter how much they might be struggling to get students to
achieve or participate in learning. When forced to prioritize, most districts stick with school-wide
implementation reforms such as school-wide grading or scheduling policies (i.e. trimesters), and
tend to drop the curriculum specific support for small groups of teachers (i.e. implementing inquiry
in science).

However, with a little planning, design, and leadership support, reforms in multiple areas can take
place. Science in the City, a program to support 6th grade science teachers throughout Grand
Rapids, blended science support and curriculum development efforts with a district-wide
technology initiative and instructional model implementation through a cohesive professional
development program. What came out of this was a great deal of learning, both by teachers and
students, and a program that changed the way the participants taught. Imagine students doing
complicated field studies to address real questions and situations from their community, sharing
and mapping their data through numerous technologies, and analyzing shared data to answer
questions and problems (that would not be possible otherwise). This was the case for Science in
the City. This article documents some of what was done and what was learned through this
program, both by teachers (through professional development) and by students.

MMSTLC Case Study - Science in the City

Page 1
Background
From a reform perspective, Science in the City is a bit of a melting pot of other efforts. In 2004,
Michigan initiated the “Freedom to Learn” program, which provided laptop computers for every 6th
grade student from participating schools. Grand Rapids Public Schools (GRPS) was an initial
participant in this effort, bringing nearly 3000 such computers into its classrooms through the
effort. Similarly, Grand Rapids Christian Schools also participated in the effort to support another
400 students, and collaborated with the public schools to implement a professional development
and technical support program to support the effort. Around the same time, GRPS was
restructuring its middle grades science curriculum, and was also implementing a program to
encourage use of the 5-E learning model (a well-known, constructivist-based model based on a
cycle of “engaging, exploring, explaining, elaborating, and evaluating concepts”). However, both
districts had minimized plans for implementing these efforts with 6th grade teachers, knowing that
the teachers would face the challenge of working with the technology provided by the laptops.

The lack of a curricular or content focus was addressed by members of the University of
Michigan’s Center for Highly Interactive Computing in Education (hi-ce), which was just completing
a six-year science reform program in Detroit and Chicago that focused on creating project-based
inquiry curriculum units that utilized advanced technologies and software tools. Collaborators on
the project included the university, schools, and the Grand Rapids-based Van Andel Education
Institute (VAEI), a non-profit group based in the city that was helping to support the technology
implementation. This team decided that they would work with 6th grade teachers and would focus
on implementing a single curriculum unit from the hi-ce materials that addressed a quarter of the
content expectations of the schools’ curricula and incorporated many software tools that would be
accessible on the students’ laptop computers. In addition, the project would address other tools
and content, including the use of GPS locators and geographic information systems (GIS), to allow
classrooms to visualize their efforts and see where other classrooms who were doing the same
activities were gathering their data. These efforts were developed in a proposal to the Michigan
Department of Education, which funded the two-year professional development program.

Getting Teachers’ Feet Wet

Starting in the fall of 2004, 19 teachers from 14 schools throughout
Grand Rapids convened for the first of five school days, scheduled
throughout the year, to begin learning about the new tools and
curriculum topics of the project. Students would not be receiving
the laptops until January, so teachers had some lead time to learn
and plan before implementing their ideas in the classroom. While
their colleagues in other content disciplines were getting general
professional development about the computers and basic software,
the science teachers were getting their feet wet, quite literally, by
being immersed in activities from the curriculum unit they would all
be teaching from in the spring. The unit focused on topics of
hydrology through a study of the local watershed, and later, on
ecosystems and water quality.

This inquiry unit is based on addressing a seemingly simple, yet complicated question: What is
the water like in our river? This question drives student inquiry throughout this project. As
students investigate water quality they construct a conceptual model of their river system and
develop an understanding of an aquatic ecosystem. Because students investigate a river situated

MMSTLC Case Study - Science in the City

Page 2
in their community, in this case, the Grand River, they are led to question what actions they could
take as individuals and as a community to preserve or improve water quality.

The unit is structured to provide a “guided inquiry experience” that might be very similar to the
work that a scientist who is addressing the same questions might be doing. Students are first
oriented to the notion of water quality through their prior experience - sharing ideas about uses of
water and what they consider to be “quality water” from a series of jars with different mixtures of
water. Students are introduced to the driving question, “What is the water like in our river?” by
either conducting a simple walk to a site on the river to observe different aspects of the river and
surrounding flora and fauna, land uses, and geography, or observing these through a series of
videos and 360 degree images of the river. After asking this driving question and observing these
aspects of the river, students are asked to brainstorm a list of possible questions they could ask or
investigate to better answer the driving question. It is these questions that are later structured by
the teachers (with the assistance of the curriculum unit) to investigate watersheds (and, in
particular, the local watershed), the movement of water, and relationships among the surrounding
landscape and the aquatic ecosystem. When students look more closely at the quality of the water
in their river, they investigate chemical and physical factors that affect water quality and the
relationship between water quality and biodiversity. Student understanding is facilitated by students
actively engaging with phenomena.

Teachers in the program learned about these ideas through conducting the actual activities used in
the curriculum materials. The 5-E instructional model aligned rather well with the inquiry-learning
model of the curriculum unit, so each lesson reviewed provided an opportunity to explore aspects
of the model. To incorporate the technology, any opportunities for note-taking, data-collection,
internet research, presentation of findings, or other similar efforts involved in such a watershed
study were conducted with the software tools made available through the Freedom to Learn
program. Supplemental science-specific tools were provided through the university partnership, or
through a grant from a local family foundation. As teachers worked through the curriculum, they
had a chance to plan how these lessons would be implemented in their classrooms in the spring.
They also applied aspects of the model and technologies in the other units they were teaching at
the time. Professional development engaged teachers in learning by doing the investigation or
using the software, and in planning for implementation, as they developed an action plan to
implement the ideas in their classroom. These were guided by UM and VAEI mentors, who
assisted in the planning and observed aspects of each teacher’s instruction.

Addressing Scientific Inquiry Skills

While the science unit was designed based on an inquiry
model, not all of the lessons utilized the true inquiry
approach of letting students investigate their own
questions, whatever they may be. Teachers facilitated this
process by taking the students’ brainstormed questions
and ordering them in a natural learning cycle. For
instance, it wouldn’t make sense for students to
investigate the various chemicals or objects found in river
water without first exploring how the water gets to the river
in the first place. So, before getting to the student-
designed investigations of water quality, teachers first
guided students to address questions about where the
river is located, and how water gets to the river.

MMSTLC Case Study - Science in the City

Page 3
Because topics like watersheds, water quality, and environmental impact are not easily observed or
experimented on by 11-12 year olds, learning was supported through the construction of physical
and dynamic models. Constructing models of their river helped learners integrate each concept
into their understanding of aquatic ecosystems. For instance, students first modeled a watershed
with paper and spray-bottles, learning how water moves by geography and how the models
translated to topographic maps. Later,
students constructed streamtables and
developed strategies to explore how runoff,
absorption, erosion and deposition work.
Through this, students came to learn how the
water gets to the river, and began to
understand what it might pick up along the
way. Once students understood this, they
then used Model-It, a dynamic modeling tool,
to construct a conceptual and simple
mathematical model of their aquatic
ecosystem. As student understanding grew
so did their model. Students continually
planned, built, tested and evaluated their
models based on the inquiry activities they
engaged in. As students learned about a
new topic, such as phosphates that come
from lawn fertilizers, they could add this to
their models to explore how the phosphates
got into the river system, and what the effects
of reducing fertilizer use might have in different conditions, such as a rainy spring or dry summer.

Being a project-based inquiry unit, the lessons built upon previous activities and prior knowledge to
eventually address the big question - what is the water like in our river? For this, students
investigate various aspects of water quality, using resources from the unit and water quality testing
kits from EarthForce and GREEN (Global Rivers Environmental Education Network). Teams of
students were responsible for different sets of tests, including temperature, turbidity, phosphates,
nitrates, dissolved oxygen, fecal coliform, and
other component variables of water quality.
Other teams collected samples of water and
mud from the river bottom to examine benthic
macroinvertebrates that might be living there.
These insects and other organisms were then
compared to indicator sheets to see whether
the quality of water might be affecting their
growth. Still other students captured
information about local vegetation, landforms,
land use, and other observations that might
help in analyzing the data for their site. All
along, each team of students was addressing
their specific questions or topics about the
river, all of which were shared with classmates
through presentations, class designed web

MMSTLC Case Study - Science in the City

Page 4
pages, or poster boards in the classroom. Students could use artifacts from their learning
throughout the project, such as models, multimedia displays, or tables and charts with data to
share their understandings of their topics with the rest of class.

Normally, this is where most classroom investigations would stop, but this is where the
collaborative nature of Science in the City comes into play. Once the students in any given
classroom understood the nature of what they studied, where they gathered the data, and what
the impact of the immediate location might have had on their investigations, they they shared the
data through a special posting web site created for the project. These data were amassed by UM
personnel and transferred to specialized map data that could be viewed by students using GIS
software tools. This sharing made city-wide analyses of data possible, so that students could see
how different water quality indicators changed at different points on the river. Using these
maps,they could then analyze how land use, geography, and population affected the water quality.
(This project was initiated before such Web 2.0 tools as Google Maps and online spreadsheets
were available to the general public, which now makes this effort even simpler).

Students had the opportunity to present their findings to various community and neighborhood
organizations within the city. Students not only used this opportunity to demonstrate their
knowledge and efforts, but some also engaged in addressing specific issues such as the use of
pesticides and the impact of invasive species on the local ecosystem. This community aspect
could promote students’ feelings of agency as several classes began developing action plans
addressing land use, water use, and education programs for citizens to maintain or improve water
quality in their city. In this specific case, students
had opportunities to showcase their work and
ideas for improvement of the watershed, which
teachers shared ideas about implementing
different tools and learning strategies with
colleagues.

Starting All Over Again

The citywide investigations of water quality using
their laptop computers and the constructivist
learning model were only half of the effort for
Science in the City. Following the first school year,
teachers spent two days in an intensive summer
academy to reflect on their individual and group
progress and to move to the next phase of the
project. Using their newfound knowledge of inquiry
learning, the instructional model and the various software tools they explored over the previous
year, teachers gathered into small groups to identify different topics they could apply these ideas to
in the coming year. Five specific topics were identified by the participating teachers, with the goal
for the next school year of developing and pilot testing a new project-based inquiry curriculum unit
that could address some of the different content expectations. Like the watershed and water
quality topics the previous year, these were topics with no real set of curriculum resources,
equipment, or quality text materials that could support student learning. See the table on the
following page for the items identified by the teams.

MMSTLC Case Study - Science in the City

Page 5
 Driving Question Curriculum Topics Included Activities

How can we improve Ecosystems, classification of Schoolyard habitat survey, analysis

our schoolyard organisms, seasonal change, of various elements of the habitat to
ecosystem? succession, interactions of species in examine seasonal change, creation
an ecosystem, energy flow through of a plan for schoolyard habitat
an ecosystem improvement.

What are the sights Light, sound, waves, transfer of Student investigations of light and
and sounds of your energy, properties of light and sound sound, analysis of pictures and
community? waves, reflection, absorption, effect recordings from the community
of medium on light and sound

How do organisms Living organisms, cells, tissues, Classification of organisms,

change over time?
What are the patterns
we see in living
creatures?
organs, systems, survival of plants/
animals, reproduction of plants/
animals, classification of organisms,
adaptation
identification of patterns among
different organisms, concept map
creation of organisms, multi-site
collection and comparison of
organisms

Why do we use salt on
the roads in winter?
Particulate nature of matter, atoms,
molecules, solutions, properties of
substances, chemical/physical
reactions, phases of matter, phase
changes
Student investigations of variables
affecting plant growth, investigations
of mixtures of solutions on freezing
points, creation of molecular models,
dramatized court case for use of salt
to melt ice

What is the water like Language and culture of Mexico, Parallel studies of watershed
in our river?* impact of water on development, information (geography, hydrology,
industry, and health, globalization, ecology) for the Rio Grande (teamed
politics and humanities topics related with science investigation on Grand
to water River), Case study analysis of
communities and policy of two cities.
*Two of the teachers were reassigned to non-science content specialties (language arts and social
studies) in their school, so they collaborated with the new science teacher to teach “What is the
Water Like in Our River?” and introduced a parallel study of the Rio Grande (Grand River) on the
Mexican border.

Each team used concepts from the previous year, along with basic instruction on curriculum design
(based on the Understanding by Design model developed by Wiggins and McTighe) to create a
draft inquiry unit that they would teach in their own classrooms in the coming school year. Each
included a driving question, the use of conceptual models, and the use of spatial data collected
from different locations around the city. All of the units concluded with some form of classroom
project where students addressed a policy issue or essential content understanding through a
student designed investigation, a presentation to classmates or others, and some artifact of their
project, including posters, proposals for policy changes, letters to the editor, etc.

During the implementation of the new curriculum units, teams used a modified version of a lesson
study to reflect upon and revise their curriculum materials. The teachers in each group would
stagger the teaching of the unit about a week or two from each other. This allowed each of the
lessons to be tested and revised multiple times throughout the single school year, rather than

MMSTLC Case Study - Science in the City

Page 6
needing 2-3 years to be refined. Using the approach, the first teacher of the group would teach
one of the lessons from his/her unit while being videotaped. While a “normal” lesson study
approach involves other teachers being present in the class to observe, the logistics of bringing
teachers to other schools to observe for a class period was impractical in this case, and so each
session was recorded with video cameras. DVDs were produced for each of the team members
from the recording and distributed within 48 hours of the actual class. Team members then had
another 2-3 days to view these on their own, and would then gather together as a team to review
the session. During this review, the next teacher who would be teaching from the lesson materials
would take notes and make modifications to the lesson based on feedback from the team. That
teacher would send the revised plan out for comments by the end of the day, gather feedback or
research from other team members, and would then teach the new lesson to his or her students.
This too was videotaped, reviewed, discussed and modified in the same timeline. Following the
multiple iterations of this one lesson, teachers also utilized this same ideas from the group
discussion to revise the rest of the lessons from the unit (or to guide their individual planning
sessions that were devoted to planning these units). Following their effort, they could even use
video segments from their teaching to provide resources to support other teachers’ use of these
units. The units then were shared with all teachers throughout the district, essentially creating a
library of resources for the teaching of the 6th grade benchmarks and use of laptop computers.

Results of the Project

Science in the City, in the most basic terms, was a two-year professional development program for
teachers. Yet, five years after the start of the project, the results of the program are still reflected in
the instructional practices of the teachers who participated in the project, and in their students’
understanding of science content and inquiry processes and skills. The citywide water quality
analyses for 6th grade students are now an established element of 6th grade instruction
throughout the city, as are the schoolyard habitat surveys generated by one of the learning
community groups within the project. Participating teachers have shared their experiences with
other educators throughout their schools and region. Many of the teachers still provide testimonial
responses from students and parents about the nature of the studies their students are
conducting. Several teachers have presented aspects of their work at state and national
technology and science education conferences.

The positive impact of the project is also backed up by data. Analysis of teacher pre- and post-
assessments for the content of the water unit used to guide instruction showed a significant gain in
teachers’ knowledge of science content relevant to the water cycle, hydrology, geology, mapping
skills, habitats, and ecology. Analysis of teacher surveys shows that teachers identified the change
of their knowledge of science in general, of watersheds and hydrology, and of water quality issues
and testing as the greatest changes in personal knowledge and skills related to this project.
Teachers were also asked to rate student knowledge of these same topics prior to and as of Feb
2006, and these were three of the four largest gains reported for student knowledge (the other was
of student use of computers – expected given the access provided through the Freedom to Learn
initiative). Students averaged approximately 30% of total points on the pre-test, and averaged
between 40 and 80% on post-tests, depending on the teacher (since some teachers taught more
of the unit than others).

MMSTLC Case Study - Science in the City

Page 7
Summary
The Science in the City program provides one picture of what can be possible when a professional
development program is collaboratively planned by all of the stakeholders in a project. The design
of the program addressed a comprehensive range of issues at the outset, and systematically
removed barriers to implementation through thoughtful considerations of the needs, context, and
goals of the project.

Science in the City also demonstrates a particular approach to inquiry that was refined over years
of work prior to the program’s inception. Rather than using a loosely coupled set of “inquiry
lessons” which engage students in particular aspects of investigation, the project introduced
inquiry to teachers through a more natural process of investigation that professional scientists
would conduct. This approach of using student questions to structure a cohesive long-term
investigation of a problem or phenomenon made sense to teachers, and included enough detail
and support that teachers felt comfortable enacting the curriculum. By trying it out, and including
all of the technology use appropriate for the situation (with the Freedom to Learn program),
teachers actually tried the approach first hand, and could more easily reflect upon the approach
than if they had to generate the ideas themselves. We hope that this example provides some
insights and examples of strategies for both classroom teachers and professional developers to
understand how to support the use of inquiry as a process for learning.

References:
Blumenfeld, P., Fishman, B. J., Krajcik, J., Marx, R. W., & Soloway, E. (2000). Creating usable innovations in
systemic reform: Scaling-up technology-embedded project-based science in urban schools. Educational
Psychologist, 35(3), 149-164.

Bobrowsky, W., Marx, R. W., & Fishman, B. (2001, March). The empirical base for professional development
in science education: Moving beyond volunteers. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the National
Association of Research in Science Teaching, St. Louis, Missouri.

Fishman, B., Marx, R. W., Best, S., & Tal, R. (2004). Linking teacher and student learning to improve
professional development in systemic reform. Teaching and Teacher Education.

Krajcik, J., Blumenfeld, P., Marx, R., & Soloway, E. (2000). Instructional, curricular, and technological
supports for inquiry in science classrooms. In J. Minstrell & E. H. v. Zee (Eds.), Inquiring into inquiry learning
and teaching in science (pp. 283-315). Washington, D.C.: American Association for the Advancement of
Science.

Loucks-Horsley, S., Love, N., Stiles, K., Mundry, S. and Hewson, P. (2003) (2nd Edition) Designing
Professional Development for Teachers of Science and Mathematics. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press

Schneider, R., & Krajcik, J. S. (2002). Supporting science teacher learning: The role of educative curriculum
materials. Journal of Science Teacher Education, 13(3), 221-245.

Singer, J., Marx, R. W., Krajcik, J., & Clay-Chambers, J. (2000). Constructing extended inquiry projects:
Curriculum materials for science education reform. Educational Psychologist, 35(3), 165-178.

MMSTLC Case Study - Science in the City

Page 8