Original Vision

The original goals for Science CO-OP were not unlike those of all the other LSC projects: help teachers in the target school districts develop a better understanding of the science and pedagogical strategies needed to effectively implement the inquiry topics and materials for the FOSS, STC or Insights kits that they had chosen for their science curriculum. What distinguishes CO-OP from most other LSCs however, is that we had to make this happen simultaneously in 40 small, rural school districts scattered across about 40,000 square miles in Missouri and Iowa. Much like the strategy devised by small-scale farmers in the Midwest almost a century ago and still used today, we developed a "cooperative" plan in which the small districts could join forces and through which our project staff could effectively and economically provide services.

In order to provide for the large number of small school districts spread across such a large area, we envisioned developing school district leadership teams who could facilitate project activities and sustain professional development at the districts after the project had ended, offering multiple summer workshops at co-op sites central to clusters of the participating school districts where expert staff and consultants could deliver content and pedagogical instruction, enlisting part-time field support staff who could provide person-to-person contact with teams at the local districts, and utilizing point-to-point and multi-site interactive television strategies to provide participants access to experts and contact with project staff throughout the school year. One final thing that we envisioned was to promote the idea of "adaptation" versus "adoption" of science kits as a hook to get all preK-6 teachers in the buildings to work together and with other teachers in Science CO-OP on developing and sharing ways of connecting science inquiry activities across the curriculum. We promoted this adaptation and sharing process by having teachers develop "teacher resource books" (TRBs) to go along with the publisher kits and teacher guides.

We felt from the start that our plan to develop strong leadership teams at each of the small school districts and to focus on cross-curricular adaptation of science kits (i.e., building TRBs) would ensure continued interactions among teachers within school districts at worst and across school districts within the co-ops that we had formed at best. Our confidence was founded in our success in working with teachers in a single, multi-building district using a similar leadership model and adaptation (TRB) approach.

Reflections from the end:

The basic idea of bringing teachers from small, rural schools together at workshops to work on TRBs has worked extremely well. Just having time together is consistently noted and rated highly by teachers on all our feedback forms. The TRBs serve as both a vehicle for sharing with other science and non-science teachers within and across districts and as a tool for teaching. From the start of the project we emphasized the idea that science kits and TRBs are district resources to be shared (within districts and even across districts), not a private teaching folder that stays in one teacher's classroom. After three years of CO-OP, we are starting to see this principle take hold. The sharing has always been very successful at the co-op level workshops, but beginning this year, we are going to start to post TRBs on the project website to facilitate sharing across all the participants in all the co-ops.

The other major success that we are seeing at this mid-point in the project is how the leadership teams are stepping up to the challenge. Our district leadership teams consist of a lead teacher (called a science advocate) from each preK-6 building in our districts (usually one per district), a high school science teacher (called a partner) from the district, and an administrator (usually an elementary school principal but in some cases the superintendent). Even though we spent the first full year of the project working exclusively with advocates and partners (modeling workshop skills, familiarizing them with the adaptation idea, etc.), for the first two years they resisted the leadership role and tended to participate as any other teacher attending a workshop might. But in this third year of the project we have seen a lot of change in a lot of the leaders. Their confidence in teaching science and helping their colleagues with their teaching have grown significantly as evidenced in their interviews, feedback and staff observations.

Challenges:
Our biggest challenge to date has been dealing with changing school district administrations and shrinking district budgets. The generally accepted premise that lasting, systemic curricular reform takes 3-5 years or more does not adequately account for the fact that school districts often change superintendents more frequently. Considering that the initial plans for our project were laid two years before our official start, about half of the superintendents who signed on 5 years ago and agreed to support the systemic effort are no longer in the control room. And anyone who thinks that the speed and direction of the leader is not the speed and direction of the group, is kidding themselves in a reform effort.

The problem of superintendent turnover and shrinking budgets are problems enough of their own, but they also make it difficult to involve in the reform efforts the teachers who don't have a primary responsibility to teach science. In a reform targeting the preK-6 science curriculum, the involvement of all certified staff in a building is critical because the curricular areas and teaching strategies are so tightly interwoven. Our plan to emphasize cross-curricular teaching with the science kits and to develop TRBs to support that effort has helped bring some of these other certified staff to non-contract time CO-OP workshops and activities, but the truly effective way to bring everyone on board is to get the full backing of the administration, starting with the superintendent, and to make the science reform a major part of the contract-time professional development--as would be done in an adoption of a new reading or math program. This contract-time strategy is where we plan to focus in our last two years of the project.

Suggestions based on lessons learned

A second lesson from which the staff of any school projects might benefit deals with the problem of changing administrators--especially superintendents. There is obviously no way to control a possible change in administrative staff, but there is a way to ensure some level of long-term commitment and continuity and that is to involve the school boards and/or powerful parent groups. We did not include these groups in any of our pre-project planning. We do promote parent involvement in the science inquiry instruction in CO-OP, but we have not explicitly targeted school boards per se. We plan to start doing so in this fourth year, but we would have saved a lot of energy in dealing with new administrators had we figured ways to involve and inform school boards right from the start.

A third area that needs considerable up-front planning and conversation with school district staff is evaluation--not the assessments that teachers do with their own students, but the evaluations that are required at the project level. Yearly classroom observations and interviews by an external evaluator, multi-page surveys of teachers and administrators, and additional student testing required by funding agencies greatly strain the goodwill relations that take are so hard to build. We actually had superintendents sign contracts at the start of the project in which they granted approval to do all these surveys, observations, interviews and assessments. But even such contracts aren't effective if a new administrator or some resistant teachers refuse to cooperate. The bottom line here is that one can never do enough up front and throughout the project to convince school folks of the need to assess.

Questions for visitors

1. Stipends and graduate credit simply don't work as motivations for most teachers who resist participation in non-contract time professional development activities. What are some other strategies that you have found work in getting this group on board?
2. Science experts, whether paid or volunteer, who are not accustomed to working with teachers (especially elementary teachers), have a difficult time making their science relevant and comprehensible at workshops or in special presentations despite their best intentions to do so. What strategies have you used to prepare science experts to work with teachers in your enhancement projects?