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With increasing focus on active learning in college classrooms, many institutions of higher education are redesigning introductory laboratory classes to provide more active-learning opportunities for students and to more authentically recreate the practices of scientists. These classes are primarily taught by graduate teaching assistants (GTAs), who often lack the pedagogical training necessary to plan for and support students' intellectual engagement in rich science tasks that require deep engagement in the practices of science and the core disciplinary ideas. We believe that graduate student discussion groups can provide an opportunity to encourage and equip GTAs with pedagogical knowledge and skills to select and use cognitively demanding instructional tasks. In this article, we describe our planning and facilitation of one such meeting with a group of GTAs about the relative cognitive demands of various laboratory activities. We propose that regularly scheduled meetings of discussion groups like this can help build learning communities among GTAs. We provide strategies to support GTAs' professional development and help them think critically about the tasks they use in their classes. In particular, we highlight the importance of the cognitive demands of tasks for engaging students in active and rigorous opportunities for science learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Attaining the vision for science teaching and learning emphasized in the Framework for K‐12 Science Education and the next generation science standards (NGSS) will require major shifts in teaching practices in many science classrooms. As NGSS‐inspired cognitively demanding tasks begin to appear in more and more science classrooms, facilitating students' engagement in high‐level thinking as they work on these tasks will become an increasingly important instructional challenge to address. This study reports findings from a video‐based professional development effort (i.e., professional development [PD] that use video‐clips of instruction as the main artifact of practice to support teacher learning) to support teachers' learning to select cognitively demanding tasks and to support students' learning during the enactment of these tasks in ways that are aligned with the NGSS vision. Particularly, we focused on the NGSS's charge to get students to make sense of and deeply think about scientific ideas as students try to explain phenomena. Analyses of teachers' pre‐ and post‐PD instruction indicate that PD‐participants began to adopt instructional practices associated with facilitating these kinds of student thinking in their own classrooms. The study has implications for the design of video‐based professional development for science teachers who are learning to facilitate the NGSS vision in science classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue brings together four effective video-based professional development programs-two in mathematics and two in science-that use classroom videos as the centerpiece of their efforts and have 'scaling up' as their goal. In each paper, the authors surface their design considerations for creating scalable and sustainable video-based professional development interventions, including the challenges and successes they have experienced. The papers also emphasize the role of professional development facilitators in the scalability and sustainability of their programs and how best to support this emerging class of education professionals. This introductory paper situates these papers within the current literature on the design and facilitation of video-based professional development programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is little consensus on the kinds and amounts of teacher support needed to achieve desired student learning outcomes when mathematics is inserted into science classrooms. When supported by educative curriculum materials (ECM) and heavy investment in professional development (PD), teachers implementing a unit designed around mathematical modeling of scientific mechanisms substantially increased students' ability to make both qualitative and quantitative predictions (Schuchardt & Schunn, 2016). Because of concerns about equitable access to support resources, we investigated whether variations in PD support while retaining ECM could differentially affect two student learning outcomes: Quantitative Predictions and Qualitative Predictions. Two contrasts were performed examining: (1) the effect of reducing PD and (2) whether eliminating PD entirely caused further harm to student learning. Reducing and eliminating PD had no significant effect on student gains in Qualitative Predictions, suggesting ECM can be sufficient for teachers to support student learning of conceptual science content. However, student gains in Quantitative Predictions decreased significantly upon reducing PD; eliminating PD did not cause significant additional decreases. Combined, these findings suggest that amount of face-to face PD support necessary to achieve student-learning gains can vary depending on whether the practice requires application of qualitative science content or quantitative reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]