Building a Bridge Between School Reform and Classroom Instruction

"Elementary science tends to be put on the back burner," says Marsal School Professor Betsy Davis. She attributes this imbalance to the societal emphasis that is placed on reading and math test scores. "Science, for better or worse, doesn't have that level of scrutiny in the elementary grades. So it's easy to push aside." The introduction of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) had Davis puzzling over how to bridge from standards to instruction in elementary science.

Marsal School Professor Donald Peurach and Northwestern University Professor James P. Spillane shared an interest in that same puzzle. Longtime collaborators in studying instructional improvement in English language arts (ELA) and mathematics, Peurach and Spillane began to wonder if what they had been learning about building instructionally focused education systems might provide clues to improving elementary science instruction to meet the aspirations of the NGSS.

In 2019, with a grant from the National Science Foundation, Peurach, Spillane, and Davis set out to investigate how school systems were adopting NGSS to improve science instruction at the primary school level. Their findings have resulted in tangible recommendations for school districts, and have served as a catalyst for a number of subsequent research proposals.

Assembled and advanced outside of government by national organizations, the NGSS were introduced in 2013. They reflect a shift in science teaching and learning ideals from learning about science content to discerning explanations for scientific phenomena by having students engage in science practices integrated with science content and concepts across scientific disciplines. The NGSS were established by a coalition of national-level research and professional associations, in collaboration with 26 lead state partners. Individual states can choose when and whether to adopt them. Michigan, for instance, adopted them a few years after the reform had been introduced; Pennsylvania has taken up NGSS much more recently.

"It's not like a switch flipped in 2013, and everyone was supposed to use these standards. They are still considered to be relatively new," says Davis.

NGSS were developed with the understanding that they could guide state-level policy initiatives aimed at improving K-12 science instruction by putting forth high expectations for students' learning content, and therefore high expectations for those who would teach that content. The NGSS outline three dimensions of science learning: science and engineering practices (making predictions, engaging in investigation, developing or using scientific models); disciplinary core ideas (the way photosynthesis works, or the way the carbon cycle works); and cross-cutting concepts. "Cross-cutting concepts are big ideas that go across science and engineering disciplines," explains Davis. For example, the idea of size and scale, which is important in biology, physics, and earth science, as well as in engineering practices.

"The idea behind NGSS is to really support teachers so that they can support kids in engaging in three-dimensional learning," says Davis. "In other words, not learning about photosynthesis by reading a textbook about photosynthesis, but instead engaging in the science practices and being able to more authentically come to an understanding of photosynthesis."

Davis acknowledges that making the shift from fact-based or conceptually based understandings to a teaching practice that reflects three-dimensional learning is a heavy lift for teachers who already have a lot to manage, particularly at the elementary level where they are required to provide instruction across a range of subjects. Questioning the bridge between ambitious policy and ambitious classroom practice is what spurred the team to investigate how the NGSS reform was actually being taken up on the ground in states, schools and school districts, and classrooms.

"We were interested in what educational systems were doing to support moving in the direction of implementing NGSS. There had been quite a bit of research on how educational systems were moving forward with reforms in teaching ELA and mathematics, but we knew less about that work within this base of science," says Davis.

The research team brought diverse expertise to the project. Davis is a science educator, teacher educator, and learning scientist. Peurach studies educational policy, leadership, and innovation, with a focus on developing and coordinating capabilities in schools, district offices, and policy contexts to support high-quality instruction. Angela Lyle served as a research fellow on the grant, and Anna Foster and Emily Seeber served as graduate student research assistants. Together with Spillane and his colleagues at Northwestern, the team set out to develop a practical theory of designing and building the educational systems that are essential to improving elementary science instruction. They also aimed to provide guidance and frameworks for educational leaders and professionals to construct high-quality science learning environments.

Peurach notes that there are different ways to organize, manage, and improve instruction. "You can build teacher professional learning communities. You can bring in a textbook series, and say let's do this and learn how to do it well. Another way to organize, manage, and improve instruction is to build what we call systems. That is, organizations and their leaders and their staff who work in relationship with each other to understand students' experiences in classrooms, teachers' experiences in classrooms, how they're working and not working, and how they might create conditions that support teachers and students working more productively in their day-to-day work in classrooms."

For much of the history of U.S. public education, says Peurach, "the work of organizing, managing, and improving instruction was located primarily in individual classrooms." However, there was no accountability for what was happening in those classrooms. This began to change in the 1980s, and continued through the '90s and '00s, with the introduction of standards and transparency in educational performance. "The incentives changed for districts and school leaders to work with teachers to help improve and coordinate their day-to-day work. And that activity played out initially in ELA and mathematics because that's where the accountability incentives were the strongest." It wasn't until the introduction of the NGSS in 2013 that district leaders, school leaders, and teachers were incentivized to prioritize science instruction with the same level of attention as ELA and math.

"We wanted to be on the scene as schools and districts really started to prioritize science instruction," says Peurach.

As the team began to gather data, they identified a set of states they wanted to work in, and from there, districts in which they wanted to work. "We were trying to look for districts where something interesting was happening. We weren't trying to say more about the typical state of affairs with elementary science. We were looking for bright spots we could shine a light on," says Davis.

The grant began in 2019. No sooner had the research team begun to make connections and conduct interviews than schools moved from in-person learning to virtual learning because of the pandemic. This, says Davis, actually made it easier to do observations. A member of the team could more seamlessly observe a school or district meeting by joining in via Zoom.

"We ended up being in four states, 13 districts in total, and in different types of school systems—public schools, charter schools, urban districts, and suburban districts as well," says Lyle, who notes that such variation is a unique feature of this particular study. "Homing in on different levels of the education system, looking at the state level, then the district level, school, and classroom, gave us a much broader look at this work than had previously been done by others."

"We interviewed people who work with science as their main responsibility, and then we worked outwards," says Foster. "We interviewed union representatives, special ed leadership, superintendents, and other instructional coaches and staff at the district level. Where possible, we tried to observe routines in the district—professional development that a district offered, or meetings among different science leaders at the district level. And then we replicated that moving downward. We looked for whoever was the science leader at the school level. We interviewed principals and then teachers the principal identified as being really active in science, and tried to observe routines around science at the school. In the final stage of data collection, we did classroom observations."

The project ran for six years. In total, the team conducted 168 interviews, did 61 observations of classrooms and professional development sessions, and collected and analyzed over 300 documents from different districts. In trying to address the puzzle of coordinating national and state academic standards with classroom instruction, the team produced a practical framework to support researchers and practitioners in examining, comparing, and improving educational systems for elementary science instruction. The framework consists of five core domains of work that are central to system building: building educational infrastructure; supporting the use of educational infrastructure in practice; managing performance and practice; managing environmental relationships; and developing and distributing instructional leadership.

Yet, developing these capabilities in school districts proved to be difficult, particularly with regard to science teaching and learning at the elementary level. The team found that districts' primary way of addressing reform measures was the procurement of educational resources—namely curriculum materials—with relatively little attention paid to the other four domains of work.

Davis found it interesting to observe the emphasis science education practitioners and district leaders put on curriculum materials. As a science educator herself, she was familiar with this emphasis. However, Peurach, who came to the project through the lens of systems organization, called this a "resource forward perspective" that is inattentive to the complexities of instructional practice.

"It was through working with colleagues who have a really different intellectual background, namely thinking about educational systems as organizations, that I realized it didn't have to be that way, and that there are other ways of thinking about how we could improve teaching and learning," says Davis.

With Christa Haverly, a colleague working on the project at Northwestern University, Davis also looked at the ways in which different districts were scheduling science in the school day. How was it being represented on daily and weekly schedules for teachers? "Science was completely invisible in some cases, even though these districts were places that we had identified as being best-case scenarios. We would get documents from them where we asked for their weekly instructional schedule across the school, and science wouldn't show up." ELA, math, and music would show up on the schedule, but science would not.

Between interviews with teachers and principals and analyzing artifacts, in the places where science did show up, the team could see how schools were ensuring that students had the opportunity to learn science.

"One of the common characteristics of these best-case scenarios was that they had some dedicated time for interventions," says Davis, referring to the time in a daily schedule when students who need particular support with ELA or math can receive that dedicated instruction. By contrast, in other settings, science may be scheduled for the rest of the class during the intervention period, meaning that the students who need particular support miss out on the opportunity to learn about science. "That's an equity problem," notes Davis.

"We turned up a whole bunch of other ways that science was getting short shrift in terms of time or attention elsewhere, like teachers not getting time for professional learning in science as compared to in ELA or math, or teachers not getting any common prep time to work with colleagues on how they were going to teach the science unit." For Davis, it was helpful to be able to identify that the problem was not just about a lack of instructional time, but about many different decisions that were being made.

The team's work had immediate impacts on the districts and schools with whom they partnered to conduct the research. They developed and distributed research reports to their partner districts and schools that included key findings and practical tools for developing system and school learning environments to support elementary science reform. In addition, they shared their findings and tools at practitioner-focused conferences and workshops to build capacity for state and local leaders to support science reform in their networks.

Findings from this project contributed to an open-access course series that Peurach designed, Transforming Education in an Interconnected World, which consists of four courses aimed at cultivating a community of educators, parents, and community stakeholders around educational improvement. Lyle and Haverly, her counterpart at Northwestern, are PIs on a follow-up proposal, a core grant for which they are seeking additional sources of funding. Their project seeks to extend the NGSS work into a comparative study of systems building in elementary science and math. "We thought that extending this into a different content area—math—and having a comparative aspect would be important. Our goals are to construct different models that can capture different system configurations and the impact of those different models on classroom instruction," says Lyle.

Another NSF proposal, this one focused on research-practice partnerships, would work with school districts in building their educational system to mobilize improvement in elementary science. A grant from the Spencer Foundation builds directly off the data recorded in the NGSS study, and focuses on the classroom level to try to understand how teachers make sense of and use district- and school-level supports in their instruction. Foster, who earned her PhD from the Marsal School in the fall of 2024, realized (through working on the grant and through dissertating) that she would like to be involved in the school system going forward. "I want to figure out ways to support districts in manifesting policies that policymakers make, but also in supporting policymakers in making better policies that are attentive to the realities of districts, and that include provisions for how to make those policies a reality," she says.

Davis says one of her greatest takeaways from the project is the impact it has had on her own teaching. "I do a lot of teaching in our elementary teacher education program, so that gives me something I can work on with my pre-service teachers. How can you advocate for yourself to be able to have time for teaching science? How can you advocate for yourself to be able to get professional learning opportunities in science teaching if you want them? It gives me a way to help them to be better positioned to prioritize science and to do a better job of teaching science."