• Ecology:  Learning by Doing and Building Bridges between Science and Education to Make a Difference
  
• Taking Design Thinking to School II
  
• Measuring the Reading Like a Historian Approach: A Curriculum Intervention in San Francisco Unified School District
  

The Ecology: Learning by Doing continuation project builds on pilot work by capitalizing on that initial program’s success in developing the Redwood Environmental Academy of Leadership (REAL) within Redwood High School. In partnership with the Sequoia Union High School District, the project team will expand REAL to a district-wide science academy in fall 2009. The partnership will involve faculty, students and staff from the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, Stanford’s Department of Biological Sciences and its School of Education, with a concentrated focus on improving teaching capacities. The Environmental Academy will be a teaching and learning lab, creating powerful tools for experiential, hands-on activities to teach ecological science and its implications to society. The scaling up of these efforts will use technology tools applied to experiential education; involve the broader Sequoia Union HS District; and will network with similar field-based science education projects within rural schools and field stations in Mexico.

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Taking Design Thinking to School II
Shelley Goldman, Professor (Teaching) of Education
Bernie Roth, Professor of Mechanical Engineering - Hasso Plattner Institute of Design

Taking Design Thinking to School is a collaboration of the School of Education, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, and teachers in local schools, to explore how design thinking can improve teaching and learning. The project moves from a pilot phase to an implementation and research phase that will help teachers prepare to bring the design learning process to more K-12 students.

At its core, design thinking is an equity issue with regard to student motivation to learn, and the specific techniques of the design process may provide life-long skills, dispositions, and confidence for solving complex problems.  During the pilot phase, the research team held two major teacher workshops; established partnerships with three schools (two in under-resourced districts), modeled design units, assisted teachers with creating and implementing units, and conducted exploratory research in the classrooms. Faculty worked with Stanford undergraduate and graduate students in the research process, and collaborated on a new course. The first year saw an explosion of teacher-initiated interest and activity in design thinking, and the results of the pilot studies reaffirmed that design holds high promise for becoming integrating into selected portions of the K-12 curriculum.

With this continuation funding, Taking Design Thinking to School II aims to help teachers learn more about the design process, understand its value in education, implement design units in their classrooms, and help teachers to assess student learning.  The research team will work in five areas: (1) professional development with teachers; (2) development and adaptation of the current curriculum with design; (3) development of assessments for research, evaluation, and classroom use; (4) opportunities for Stanford students to participate K-12 research, and (5), increasing the scale and dissemination efforts of this work.

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Measuring the Reading Like a Historian Approach: A Curriculum Intervention in San Francisco Unified School District
Sam Wineburg, Professor of Education and by courtesy, History

The US is in the midst of an adolescent literacy crisis.  Increasingly, students arrive in high school classrooms unable to learn from the more complex textbooks and materials that comprise the course content. The history curriculum is an obvious site for reading and writing instruction, however, few high school history teachers have training in discipline-specific reading instruction. 

During the 2008-09 pilot project within the San Francisco Unified School District, Stanford researchers trained teachers to implement a document-based history curriculum over seven months, which emphasized greater content depth and discipline-specific reading.  This curriculum was based on six years of work developing a course that draws from the latest research on cognition, learning, and reading comprehension.  The results showed that students in treatment classrooms made significant gains in generalized reading comprehension, when compared to those in control classrooms.  Students in the experimental classrooms also scored equally well on the State standardized testing in history, despite using a different curriculum than comparable control classes. 

While the SF Unified School District would like the Stanford educators to work in all of its high schools, the team will use the continuation funding to first develop psychometrically valid and highly reliable historical thinking measures and scoring rubrics that align with the “Reading Like a Historian” curriculum. Researchers will engage in extensive development and testing over the next 18 months, bringing drafts of assessments into classrooms, sitting with focus groups of students, administering test items, and eliciting student thinking so that that research team can be sure that students get a test item right for the right reasons and wrong for the wrong reasons. By performing this carefully designed research and development work, and succeeding; the Stanford team will be able to engage in a larger-scale implementation of the Reading Like a Historian approach throughout SFUSD.

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