Samantha Johnson, who teaches physical science to eighth graders at Bancroft Middle School in San Leandro, joined the Mills Teacher Scholars group in the fall of 2010. She recently presented her Mills Teacher Scholars’ inquiry this March at the Teacher Researcher Day of the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) Conference in San Francisco, where her session drew a large audience of science teachers interested in improving their teaching of graphing.

Sam’s inquiry is focused on the complex series of understandings her students need to master before they can read and create motion graphs*. Sam has been using multiple sources of data, including student interviews and videos of group work, to understand her students’ thinking, and to find out where they are having difficulty in learning to graph and to understand the meaning of graphs. Sam explains the value of these data sources when she says about the process of collaborative inquiry:

I think I’m also going to really benefit from discussions about student thinking; I think a lot of the answers students gave were conceptually correct, but they reversed the x and y points. Hearing them SAY that (and then explain what happened), I think is going to end up as more valuable than just reading their answers, and attempting to interpret the WHY behind the WHAT.”

*Motion graphs are graphs with time on the horizontal axis and distance on the vertical axis. These graphs show how far and how fast a person or object has traveled in a given time. A steeper slope indicates that the motion was faster. A flatter slope indicates that the motion was slower.

Mills Teacher Scholars at NSTA

In addition to Sam’s presentation at NST Associate Directors Claire Bove and Carrie Wilson led a session on supporting collaborative conversations in professional learning teams. Additionally, Shelley Grant and Isabelle McDaniel each presented their work at separate sessions at the Teacher Researcher Day of the NSTA National Conference.

Shelley teaches science with Sam at Bancroft, and has been a member of the Mills Teacher Scholars group for six years. In her session, Shelley gave an overview of her six years of inquiry with Mills Teacher Scholars. Shelley and Sam have collaborated extensively on the inquiry into eighth graders’ understanding of motion graphs.

Isabelle teaches second grade at Creative Arts Charter School in San Francisco, and has been a member of the Mills Teacher Scholars group for four years. Her session focused on two years of inquiry in which she has worked to foster in her second grade science students their development of conceptual understanding and their capacity for reflection during the process of scientific experimentation.