Glossary teachers – active in-service teachers of science. pupils – all learners in the secondary school. students – learners at the university level, however, they are NOT a target audience. professional learning communities of teachers (PLCT) – community that works together on professional development. coaches – partners, who facilitate processes in PLCTs. practitioner inquiry (PI) – systematic collecting of data to find answers for problems in education. inquiry based learning (IBL) – a teaching approach, where pupils carry out real experiments, which foster learning of science. A teacher guides/supervises the process. Introduction The project Remote Inquiries in Science Education (RISE) directly addresses the needs of science teachers regarding the experimental work in remote conditions. Results of the project will also be applicable in other remote conditions, pupils’ longer illness. Remote professional development courses address teachers, who have probelms in realizing mobilities. Background and context Preliminary investigation of the status of experimental work in science teaching evidently indicated that real experiments, where pupils carry out experiments using equipment, not only observe movies or animations/simulations, was practically negligible during spring COVID-19 quarantine. As it seems that the pandemic may persist, generations of students may not receive the science education suggested as a good practice. The RISE projects focuses mainly on IBL, the approach, where pupils form their inquiry question reflecting their interest, design and carry out experiments, and draw conclusions from observations or collected measurements. In this way pupils become owners of own learning. The teachers experienced in IBL can easily adapt the method to other situations, such as problem learning, but also carrying out experiments as demonstrations and similar. Besides, PI provides the efficient method to inspect the effects of the experimenting. The teachers involved in the RISE project will achieve this level of experience in two ways, through remote workshops during PLCTs or in remote courses designed and implemented in this project. Objectives and description of activities - To train a group of in-service teachers in remote meetings of PLCTs in each partner country. For this training, the collection of remote IBL units aligned with curriculum will be developed and tested, and instruments that facilitate the building of the community and practitioner inquiry will be developed or adapted to remote conditions. - To design and organize a remote professional development course focused on training teachers, beginners in IBL, in remote IBL implementation and on organizing a functional PLCT in a local environment. - To design and organize a remote professional development course focused on training teachers more experienced in IBL, in development of remote units and carrying out the PI to inquire the effects of their methods. Number and profile of participants In the RISE project 4 PLCTs will be formed, one in each country and teachers in those PLCTs will receive a direct training from partners. We estimate between 24 and 40 teachers involved directly. As science teachers teach more classes, we estimate that the teachers’ involvement in PLCT will affect their teaching and consequently several hundred pupils will be affected indirectly. To each of the courses between 16-20 participants will join, resulting in another cohort of up to 40 science teachers and hundreds of their pupils. All four partners will improve and develop the coaching skills, especially the coaching under remote conditions. Besides, participants to the Final conference will be informed about RISE results and hteri availability. Methodology The partners will co-design workshops for PLCTs, where teachers will test the units and other instruments and reflect on their learnings. Those materials will be improved based on teachers’ reflections and will be incorporated to the trainings. The pilot implementation of trainings will be organized and participants’ reflections will be used for further improvement of the workshops. The e-collection of remote IBL units and a set of instruments and protocols supporting building of remote PLCT and remote PI will be finalized and published available on web. Results - e-collection of remote IBL units; - e-set of instruments for building PLCT adapted to remote conditions; - e-set of instruments to support remote PI; - Training course (24 hours) on remote IBL (for IBL beginners); - Training course (24 hours) on development of remote IBL units and PI focused on IBL (for IBL experienced). Impact and longer term benefits Collections of remote IBL units and instruments will remain publicly available. Both remote courses will be organized by partners also after the end of the RISE project at least once a year for a few years at least. Many teachers will have an opportunity to attend courses.
We developed methodology for experimental work, more precisely, for inquiry-based learning in science subjects in remote conditions. We tested the developed units in the professional learning communities of teachers. We developed the methodology for facilitating the work at meetings of these communities under remote conditions. Based on the experience, we designed and piloted two courses. The first one was focused on remote inquiry-based learning for novices, that is, for teachers less experienced in inquiry-based learning approach. The second one was for experienced teachers and besides inquiry-based learning, it introduced also practitioner inquiry as a tool for teachers to inquire own classroom practice. Both courses were successfully piloted. The first course was hybrid in a sense that the first two days of the course were held in person, and the continuation was remote. The second course was remote entirely. In this way we tested and compared both structures of the course. Findings are presented to more details in the report on intellectual outputs. Finally, the teachers presented their practice and its inquiry in local meetings and at the final international conference.
The new conditions that arose during the COVID-19 panpidemic and remote work greatly hindered the students' independent experimental work. Experimental work is crucial in science subjects since these subjects are experimental in nature. Only through experimental work do students learn to ask questions to which answers can be found through experiments, plan experiments and predict their outcomes, and the most important, form conclusions based on experimental results. In addition, the communication of one's observations with other students is also important, and this includes the organisation of the obtained data, and the presentation of data with tables, graphs and/or sketches of observations and measurements presented to students’ peers. The role of the teacher is also different in inquiry-based learning. The teacher is in the role of a supervisor who facilitates the students in their work with suitable questions or hints, and students have to find the answers themselves from the results of their observations and measurements. The main goal of this course was to develop the methodology for remote experimental work, to train in service teachers and develop two courses for training the teachers in remote experimental work.