R324A180202
5E-SESE is designed to support special educators who teach science to students with the most significant cognitive disabilities. This online professional development system includes learning modules and individualized coaching for special educators.
With many states adopting rigorous, multidimensional science content standards, science achievement expectations for students with significant cognitive disabilities are increasing. Most students receive science instruction from special educators who are not prepared to provide instruction that helps students meet these expectations.
The 5E-SESE system combines the 5E-model of inquiry-based science instruction with Next Generation Science Standards and Universal Design for Learning. Teachers experience professional development that integrates these components while they design universally designed, inquiry-based science instruction for their students. We hypothesize that if teachers use this model to design and implement lessons, students will have greater opportunity to learn science and demonstrate greater science achievement.
Field testing recently concluded, and the participating teachers were excited about the model and reported increased student engagement. The 5E-SESE project is moving into its final year with a pilot test and follow-along study.
Meagan Karvonen
Director
Welcome to the 5E-SESE project!
Our video is based on 5E Science Education for Special Educators as it was implemented during early usability testing (2019) and field testing (2021-22) phases. In fall 2022 we will begin a full-scale pilot test of the 5E-SESE professional development model. This has been an exciting opportunity to infuse Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles into an inquiry cycle for professional development.
We’d love to talk about the way UDL principles can support PD design that is more engaging and relevant for teachers, and how teaching teachers to use UDL principles when designing science instruction can support more inclusive, accessible, and engaging science instruction for K-12 students. Are you working on similar instructional design projects? What experiences have you had designing inclusive science education PD?
Lorna Quandt
Lorna Quandt
Asst. Professor, Educational Neuroscience
Hi Meagan, this is such important work. I love how you have the teachers themselves go through a sort of scientific process in order to pass along science lessons to their special education students. I see that as a way of giving them a lived experience through which they can then pass on their experiences to their students.
I would like to know a little more about what was in the content of their lessons that was different from how they presented science prior to the 5E SESE project. Was it mostly a change of content, structure, pacing, or something else?
Lovely video--I enjoyed the animations and the professional level of video production!
Meagan Karvonen
Director
Hi Lorna, thanks for your message! We do see the teachers' learning experience as a powerful way to get them grounded in designing instruction for their students.
We are in the process of analyzing data from the field test. Teachers did not typically have written science lesson plans before they started the project. At the beginning, their goals for science instruction included increasing participation and engagement, and adding more science instruction time. Later they had content-related goals, such as making more connections to grade-level science content the students' peers were learning. In terms of self-reported science instructional practices, we saw an increase in practices such as having students make predictions and explain what they learned, engage with peers during science activities, and use misconceptions during instruction. Next we will be looking at their lesson plans and teaching videos. Our upcoming pilot includes a business-as-usual comparison group, so that's where we hope to learn more!
Thanks again for your interest in the project!
Kelly Riedinger
Lorna Quandt
Lisette Torres-Gerald
Beautiful video. I would love to get the student perspective on this if they are able to share their science experience.
Kelly Riedinger
Meagan Karvonen
Director
Lisette, what a great idea! We are analyzing videos of the teachers' instruction right now. We see some nice examples of students being more engaged in instruction. We didn't include direct student feedback in this study but it is a great idea for a future project! Thanks for your suggestion.
Kelly Riedinger
Lisette Torres-Gerald
Of course! So happy to see this work being done.
Leanne Ketterlin Geller
Such important work! Thank you for sharing. I appreciate the way you connect the 5E model with UDL to provide accessibility supports for all students. The usability data are very encouraging. I'm excited to see how this work keeps evolving!
Kelly Riedinger
Meagan Karvonen
Brianna Blaser
This is such great work and I loved seeing the footage of the students in your video. I'm curious whether your content includes any computer science? As we see more and more CS in K12 education, it's important to make sure that students with disabilities are exposed to CS.
Lorna Quandt
Meagan Karvonen
Director
Hi Brianna, thanks for your question! I agree that it is important for students with disabilities to have opportunities to learn computer science. In this project we target the science performance expectations that are prioritized in partnering sites because they are part of what is tested on statewide summative assessments. This group of students has had extremely limited instructional time in science, so we're starting with the core domains. It is nice to think about a future where they could have broader opportunities including computer science!
Brianna Blaser
Brianna Blaser
If you do ever go down that road, our project AccessCSforAll is a resource for accessibility in K12 CS education. Don't hesitate to reach out.
Meagan Karvonen
Dan Roy
Research Scientist, Interest-based Learning Mentor, Learning Game Designer
Thanks for sharing. I enjoyed seeing all those smiling faces! I was wondering whether you're able to integrate any project based learning or other hands-on activities. Also, do the students have input into what they're learning or how they approach it, such as student-proposed projects or digging deeper into a question important to them?
Are there any unexpected obstacles that came up in your work between design and implementation/testing? What surprised you?
If you get to continue the work beyond 2022, what directions do you think you'd prioritize?
Sarah Koebley
Associate Director
Hi Dan - great questions! The model incorporates 5E as a central framework, so the idea of student inquiry is integrated throughout the learning modules. Project-based learning approaches are aligned with the 5E-SESE model. This model also includes Universal Design for Learning so student choice and access are center stage. Teachers choose from 9 science standards that span the 3 science domains, so they are able to make instructional decisions based on student interest, and of course, their own interest as well. One of our biggest unexpected obstacles was CoVid which caused the project to pause for a year. The impact of Covid on the population of students with significant cognitive disabilities was especially intense. However, teachers this year in the field test were enthusiastic even as they were faced with increased pressure during a restart to face-to-face schooling. This project continues for the next 2 years - we are excited to be preparing for the full pilot test and a final year of follow-on studies after that. Thank you for the great questions!
Dan Roy
Tara Robillard
What an amazing video and project. I could feel the excitement of the teachers and students! I wonder if you could provide a little more information about the "virtual coaching" component of the project? Who were the virtual coaches? Was this a one-on-one model of coaching and was it customized to fit the needs of each educator and their situation? Was it valued and viewed as being an effective strategy?
Sarah Koebley
Associate Director
Hello Tara - thank you for your comments and great questions! Our coaches this year during the field test were also members of our design team who assisted in designing the coaching model, were experienced with working with teachers of students with significant cognitive disabilities, and were experience in supporting those teachers in science instruction. The coaching cadre will grow next year as we add more teachers to the study and since this is a 1:1 coaching model. While there are elements that each teacher must complete (e.g., a lesson plan and implementation of the plan that incorporate UDL, 5E, and 3-dimensional science standards), coaches work with teachers to assure that individual classroom and local contexts are honored. While we are still evaluating field test data, early analysis indicates that teacher goals improved to be more content-oriented and focused on increasing science instructional time. We are also seeing more teacher focus on incorporating the science and engineering practices for students. We look forward to learning more as we analyze further and disseminate the results.
Marcelo Worsley
Assistant Professor
I really enjoyed watching your video and learning more about this project. It sounds like teachers are being supported to create lesson plans. I was curious if the teachers are in community with one another, and if they are sharing their lesson plans for other educators to use?
Lindsay Ruhter
Research Associate
Hi Marcelo, thank you for your feedback and your question! For this project, we don’t have a system for teachers to collaborate with each other or share lesson plan ideas. However, it would be interesting to think about a community of teachers supporting each other in their science teaching, perhaps through a community of practice. This is a great idea for future work. Thank you for the suggestion!
Maria (Mia) Ong
Beautiful, informative, and inspiring video!
What questions do you have going into the full-scale pilot test, and what are some of your expectations and hopes? Best wishes in your next phase.
Lindsay Ruhter
Research Associate
Hi Maria, thank you for your feedback and your questions! For our pilot, we’ll have a comparison group of teachers whom we’ll ask to teach science in the same way they normally do. We are hoping that the teachers in the experimental group (participating in the 5E-SESE PD model) report higher self-efficacy in teaching science to their students, gain more science content knowledge, and embrace more fully an inquiry-based stance for their students in learning science. We’ll also examine student science performance among students in both groups and hope to see evidence of increased science knowledge with students in our experimental group. We still have questions about how teachers in both groups approach planning science lessons and how readily they might shift their teaching towards models that are more inquiry-focused. Thanks again for the questions and the well wishes!
Meagan Karvonen
Director
I will also tack on to Lindsay's reply that we plan to do some case studies of implementation in selected sites, to see how their local context might influence adoption and use of the model. We're excited to see what we learn!
Lauren Bauman
I really enjoyed your video! Thank you for sharing your important work. I especially liked the animation between 1:00 and 1:06 that showed the 5E-SESE model. In that part, there was a mention of "Universal Design" principles. In that vein, I'm curious if you see this model as specifically meant to benefit students with significant disabilities or if the same principles could be applied to all science lessons and benefit students who don't identify as having a significant disability? Additionally, is this a "stand-alone" PD experience or could it be coupled with other science PD to increase accessibility on a broader scale? I could see many teachers and students benefiting from this type of training!
Meagan Karvonen
Director
Hi Lauren, thanks for your questions! While our project is grounded in a very specific population of students, we actually think UDL principles benefit all students, including those without disabilities. Teachers might find the process of layering universal design considerations into an inquiry-based lesson valuable regardless of the populations they work with. Some of the UDL guidelines might be more or less relevant in different populations (e.g., most students without disabilities will not need supports to gain physical access to science instruction), but others are universal (e.g., heightening salience of goals and objectives and providing options for self-regulation are both strategies to support engagement, and that matters for all learners). We have even embedded strategies to support UDL for adult learners in our instructional coaching process.
Our PD model targets teacher knowledge of science content as well, but I can imagine ways to take the UDL concepts into other science PD contexts and couple them with other existing PD. Great idea!
Rebecca Sansom
Thank you so much for your work. I wonder whether you could elaborate more on the ways you integrated NGSS with 5E and UDL. We are working on a PD program with rural science teachers who are new to NGSS and we've struggled a bit to integrate 5E with NGSS--they just jump on the 5E (maybe because it's familiar?) and forget about the three dimensions of NGSS. Since you're also layering UDL, how do you think about the process of lesson design?
Sarah Koebley
Associate Director
Hello Rebecca - this is a great question! Our project has some nice overlap with the goals of your work in Utah. The teachers on whom our project is focused are also often quite isolated from their peers who teach students with significant cognitive disabilities when they are a single teacher in a single school. Unlike your teacher population, the teachers in our study typically have not had many science courses or opportunities to boost their science content knowledge. They tend to be especially anxious to jump to lesson planning (the 5E and UDL parts of our model) before learning the needed science content (the 3D-standards part of our model). We designed our self-paced learning modules (and the aligned lesson planning model) to take this tendency into account by requiring teachers to first focus on each of the 3 dimensions for a specific standard (of their own choosing), respond to questions, and begin their lesson planning process there (using a lesson plan format we provide and with guidance from 1:1 coaching sessions). In addition, we have included "scenarios" in each of the learning modules consisting of special education teachers talking with their general education science teacher peers about the science content and their need to understand it before they start in on a lesson plan. This is the project's approach to modeling for teachers effective practices in lesson planning and the types of conversations that we know can support embedded and ongoing teacher learning. While our current study doesn't measure this exact construct, your use of social network analysis is such an interesting lens to measure aspects of this type of teacher learning. UDL is also layered into our lesson planning design; after teachers have learned each of the 3 dimensions for a specific standard (including common misunderstandings about that content), they choose a phenomenon on which their students will focus, and begin to consider ways in which engagement, representation, and action/expression can be incorporated into their lesson. In this way, they are front-loading the lesson with science content and UDL decisions before they start into the specifics of each of stage of 5E. We have also embedded strategies to support adult learners in our approach to instructional coaching. We are excited about the results we've seen so far and are looking forward to expanding in our upcoming pilot year with more coaches and more teachers. Thank you for your questions! We look forward to following your progress!
Rebecca Sansom
Sarah, Thank you so much for your response, and the detailed way you outlined the process for teachers.
I appreciate also the comparison between our projects and some of the struggles that special education teachers might have with isolation and lacking access to professional collaboration.
I think we are also leaning toward a similar strategy--with a focus first on the three dimensions and once those are well-developed, adding in the 5Es. If you have a template or series of questions you ask teachers to think about during lesson planning, I would love it if you could share! I'm not sure if we can post email addresses here, but I'll try to track yours down and reach out that way.
Nastassia Jones
Thank you for sharing this important work! We have some teachers who teach students with significant disabilities participating in our program so that they can bring virtual field trips to their students.