Vertical Teaming: K-12 Teachers Engaged in Scientific Research in Rural Settings

Improving the knowledge and skills of practicing K-12 science teachers is our challenge. By doing so, teachers bring a renewed understanding and excitement for science to classrooms and can pass along their enhanced skills and growing expertise to their K-12 students. Yet, many K-12 teachers, particularly those in rural areas, find themselves isolated from other scientists and science educators and often have scarce resources for experiments and other classroom activities. Enochs (1988) points to the isolation of rural teachers as aprime cause for the problems surrounding the recruitment and retention of qualified teachers in rural settings. To help counter this isolating tendency, Enochs suggests that rural schools "connect science instruction to their rural environment, " (p. 9) using local "industries, businesses, and state and county agencies " (p. 10) as partners in the effort. Others promote similar approaches, such as Colton (1981), who encourages teachers to develop an interdisciplinary approach to science education that focuses on local resources to help rural students connect science to their lives. This study explores the outcomes of a form of experiential professional development in science education for rural educators that involved teachers working in multi-grade level teams on field-based practical science projects with scientists. Teacher Professional Development Alberts (2009), the editor of the journal, Science, asserts that besides the ability to "know, use, and interpret scientific information," our next generation of students also needs to be able "to generate and evaluate scientific evidence and explanations, to understand the nature and development of scientific knowledge, and to participate productively in scientific practices and discourse" (p. 437). One way of encouraging deeper and more engaged methods for the teaching of science is to provide scientific research experiences for science teachers. The teachers can use these experiences to help communicate these notions of scientific inquiry to their students. Typically, the design for such professional development programs involves teachers at the same or close to the same level. Three examples of professional development programs with teachers within their own grade levels are the a) NRC Chemistry Roundtable (2009), b) US Department of Energy Office of Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists (2010), and c) Columbia University's Summer Research Program for Science Teachers (2009). Rarely, however, do such professional development programs incorporate both elementary school and secondary teachers into their approach (Loucks-Horsley, Hewson, Love, & Stiles, 1998). Our science teacher professional development program for the rural panhandle region of North Florida is similar in many ways to the Columbia University project. Rather than at a university, however, our teachers conducted their scientific research in the field within their rural district and worked with area organizations and scientists (Science Collaboration: Immersion, Inquiry, Innovation, Sc:iii, n.d.). Another important distinction is that the Columbia project admitted only secondary teachers, the majority of whom were high school level, while our program created vertical teams of K- 12 teachers, spanning elementary, middle and high schools. This concept of vertical teaming started in the early 1990s; its initial focus, however, was to facilitate and improve curricular development rather than teacher professional development. Vertical Teaming Vertical teaming engages "a small number of people from different levels within an organization who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable" (Bertrand, Roberts & Buchanan, 2006, p. 1 8). Vertical teaming involves the collaboration and exchange of ideas among educators across the grade levels. Bertrand et al. (2006) enunciate the four goals of vertical teaming as "collegiality, professional growth, school improvement, and transition" (p. …