{"id":8341,"date":"2019-04-22T16:58:58","date_gmt":"2019-04-22T16:58:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/citejournal.org\/\/\/"},"modified":"2019-08-30T20:10:51","modified_gmt":"2019-08-30T20:10:51","slug":"shoulder-to-shoulder-teacher-professional-development-and-curriculum-design-and-development-for-geospatial-technology-integration-with-science-and-social-studies-teachers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citejournal.org\/volume-19\/issue-2-19\/current-practice\/shoulder-to-shoulder-teacher-professional-development-and-curriculum-design-and-development-for-geospatial-technology-integration-with-science-and-social-studies-teachers","title":{"rendered":"Shoulder to Shoulder: Teacher Professional Development and Curriculum Design and Development for Geospatial Technology Integration With Science and Social Studies Teachers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Geospatial tools have been in the K-12 curriculum for several decades, yet they remain underutilized by educators. For example, the Geography for Life <\/em>(Geography Education Standards Project, 1994) Standards called for integration of geographic information systems (GIS) into classroom instruction, but this expectation has rarely been met (Milson & Kerski, 2012). In general, the barriers to integrating GIS \u2013 complexity of the technology, difficulty in accessing datasets, and steep instructional time demands of inquiry learning \u2013 have prevented all but the most ambitious teachers from using geospatial tools with their students. The literature documents successful cases of GIS curriculum integration (e.g., Baker & White, 2003; Bodzin, Fu, Peffer, & Kulo, 2013; Rubino-Hare et al., 2016), but most K-12 students graduate with no exposure to advanced geospatial technologies such as GIS.<\/p>\n

Technological and social changes since 1994, however, have made the integration of GIS and other powerful geospatial tools far more accessible than before. First, the tools themselves have changed: GIS capabilities, which have traditionally required complex client-side software manipulating bulky datasets, are now readily available and easily accessed on the Cloud. Through tools such as Esri\u2019s ArcGIS.com, users can access an ever-increasing library of maps and data. Related tools such as global positioning system (GPS) capability have expanded from expensive dedicated devices such as GPS units to ubiquitous devices such as cellphones and automobiles.<\/p>\n

These technical changes have opened a floodgate of geospatial activity in everyday life.  Common activities such as using paper maps for driving have been supplanted by turn-based navigation. Even when driving to a familiar location in which the route is known, drivers will commonly consult a web map to check for traffic volume, construction zones, and accidents to determine shortest routes.<\/p>\n

Search engines such as Google automatically return maps in response to any location-based query. Social media and other services routinely draw upon location data, and investigating suspicious behavior may begin with reviewing a user\u2019s location history (Kantra, 2016; Kielman, 2014).<\/p>\n

These technological and social changes have created both challenges and opportunities for K-12 schools. The allure comes from the demand for geospatially ready STEM workers and academics (Baker, 2012; U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration, 2016). The advent of more accessible, browser- and mobile-based geospatial technologies makes K-12 integration much more feasible than at any point in the past.<\/p>\n

The remaining pieces of the puzzle are (a) untangling the challenges of integrating powerful, inquiry-driven instruction into K-12 curriculum and classroom teaching, and (b) developing models for teacher preparation and\/or professional development to make this integration possible (see Baker et al., 2015). Only when teachers and developers work side by side, shoulder to shoulder, can both challenges be addressed at once.<\/p>\n

Rationale<\/h2>\n

K-12 curricula and classrooms are crowded in several ways. The curriculum is crowded conceptually, packed with topics and skills that teachers must cover or risk poor performance by their students on high-stakes end-of-course assessments. These constraints leave little time for integrating novel GIS learning activities, even if they align with the curriculum.<\/p>\n

The classroom is crowded both physically and temporally. The physical crowding occurs as underfunded school districts reduce personnel costs by increasing class sizes. The temporal crowding comes from the myriad demands of instructional time, classroom management, assessment routines, additional school events, and inclement weather that leads to school closings. Outside of the school day, the demands on teachers\u2019 time remain steep, as they evaluate student work, attend faculty meetings and sporting events, conduct parent conferences, participate in district-mandated professional development, and more.<\/p>\n

Challenges Specific to Geospatial Curriculum Integration<\/h3>\n

Geospatial technologies and other new learning tools cannot easily enter this crowded space. First, teachers and students require time to learn the technologies\u2019 interface, data handling, analysis capabilities, and more. Second, the inquiry learning models that make the most effective use of geospatial technologies all require time both outside of the classroom, during teachers\u2019 scant professional development time, and inside the classroom, during instruction.<\/p>\n

Finally, geospatial integration programs cannot dictate the school-adopted curriculum by altering the required content to meet the availability of maps and datasets. Instead, geospatial integration efforts must find the points of connection, entering into the existing curriculum by meshing with established expectations of content coverage and assessments that align to prescribed learning goals.<\/p>\n

As a result, geospatial integration into K-12 classrooms involves a delicate harmonization of many variables, including curriculum-specified content, relevant available data and data collection opportunities, structuring low-threshold, inquiry-driven learning activities, and finding ways to weave in technology instruction along the way (e.g., Zalles & Manitakos, 2016).<\/p>\n

Furthermore, successful integration requires specific technological pedagogical content knowledge (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) and support for teachers as they incorporate geospatial technologies into their classrooms. Teaching with geospatial technologies involves geospatial science pedagogical content knowledge, a specific type of technological pedagogical content knowledge.  Teachers with geospatial science pedagogical content knowledge have a more complete understanding of the complex interplay between pedagogical content knowledge and geospatial pedagogical content knowledge and can teach content using appropriate pedagogical methods and geospatial technologies (Bodzin, Peffer, & Kulo, 2012).  This knowledge involves understanding both how to model geospatial data exploration and analysis techniques and how to effectively scaffold students\u2019 geospatial thinking and analysis skills.<\/p>\n

Previous Geospatial Curriculum Integration Efforts<\/h3>\n

Most recent geospatial curriculum integration efforts have consisted of a single unit or module of geospatially enhanced study (for example, Hammond, 2015; Milson & Curtis, 2009; Perkins Hazelton, Erickson, & Allan, 2010; Shin, 2006\u2014see also the stand-alone GeoInquiries<\/em> lessons created by Esri: esri.com\/geoinquiries<\/a>). These researchers and curriculum designers have found creative ways to harmonize the variables of content, data, technology, and teacher professional development.<\/p>\n

These studies are smaller scale, however, and they fail to yield a design model that can be used to guide the generation of new geospatially enhanced instruction. Other researchers have been able to conduct larger scale projects by integrating geospatial tools across an extended instructional sequence or even an entire curriculum (Doering & Veletsianos, 2007; Goldstein & Alibrandi, 2013), resulting in curricular design principles (Doering, Scharber, Miller, & Veletsianos, 2009).<\/p>\n

As an example, Edelson and his collaborators developed both curriculum and technology, integrating their WorldWatcher visualization environment into earth science instruction (Edelson, Pitts, Salierno, & Sherin, 2006) and their My World GIS into multiple instructional areas (Edelson, Smith & Brown, 2008). Their work was guided by the Learning-for-Use design framework (Edelson, 2001), which begins with learning principles and derives an instructional design process for generating geospatially enhanced inquiry learning.<\/p>\n

One of the most extensive curriculum design projects with geospatial technologies has been delineated by Bodzin and collaborators (e.g., Bodzin, 2011; Bodzin & Cirucci, 2009; Bodzin & Fu, 2014; Bodzin et al., 2015; Bodzin, Fu, Kulo, & Peffer, 2014; Kulo & Bodzin, 2011, 2013). Their work, which focuses on Earth and environmental sciences, has articulated a geospatial curriculum approach for instruction and a teacher professional development model that uses educative curriculum materials (Bodzin et al., 2013; Bodzin, Anastasio, Sahagian, & Henry, 2016).<\/p>\n

Building on this earlier work, we initiated a teacher-researcher collaborative project to design, develop, and test a series of novel socio-environmental science investigations (SESI; see also Sadler, Barab, & Scott, 2007; Zeidler & Nichols, 2009) using a geospatial curriculum approach and STEM-related mentoring. The project as described in this manuscript took place over the course of 1 year. The first 9 months were devoted to the design and development work, followed by 10 weeks of prototype implementation that occurred before the end of the school year.<\/p>\n

Teacher professional development took place for several weeks over the summer, in biweekly development meetings, and during implementations.  The resulting inquiry-based investigations are designed to take advantage of recent developments in powerful, mobile geospatial technologies to promote students\u2019 STEM-related workforce and academic skills. The content of these curriculum-aligned activities focuses on social issues related to environmental science. The pedagogy is inquiry-driven, with students engaged in hands-on work with data to answer open-ended questions.<\/p>\n

These investigations can be implemented across multiple content areas common in secondary science and social studies curricula. These issues are multidisciplinary, involving decision-making based on the analysis of geospatial data, examination of relevant social science content, and consideration of social equity implications.<\/p>\n

We used a design partnership model that included education professors with background on curriculum design and development with geospatial technologies, classroom teachers, content experts in the natural sciences and social sciences, and industry partners who use geospatial technologies in their occupations and who served as mentors in the classroom. Organizing this complex combination of teachers, mentors, researchers, and scientists and having them work shoulder to shoulder requires both a high level of trust and a clear design model.<\/p>\n

Our work was guided by a specific curriculum approach for geospatial learning and proceeded under a design process that incorporated simultaneous teacher design participation and professional development. The goal was to produce well-designed geospatially integrated instructional materials for classroom use and to articulate design principles and processes that can be applied in other K-12 settings and teacher education classrooms.<\/p>\n

Our teacher-collaborators work in an urban public high school serving a high-needs student population. For example, all students at the school receive free breakfast and lunch. We collaborated with the school\u2019s science and social studies departments to develop the geospatial learning activities for implementation with the entire ninth-grade class, approximately 140 students. The following sections present our curriculum approach for geospatial learning, the curriculum development process, the teacher professional development strategy. We then discuss our development work by highlighting one of the SESI investigations.<\/p>\n

Curriculum Approach for Geospatial Learning<\/h2>\n

Our geospatial curriculum approach for learning was an extension of previous research (Bodzin, 2011; Bodzin et al., 2015; Bodzin, Peffer, & Kulo, 2012) combined with the National Science Foundation Geotech Center\u2019s Geospatial Technology Competency Model (U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration, 2010). The resulting curriculum approach sought to promote students\u2019 geospatial thinking and reasoning skills by enacting classroom inquiry that embodied five design principles (listed in Figure 1):<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Use motivating contexts and personally relevant and meaningful examples to engage learners.<\/li>\n
  2. Design image representations that illustrate visual aspects of social studies and Earth and environmental scientific knowledge.<\/li>\n
  3. Design Web GIS data to make geospatial relations readily apparent.<\/li>\n
  4. Provide instructional scaffolds (Jonassen, 1999; Quitana et al., 2004) to help students analyze geospatial relations.<\/li>\n
  5. Develop curriculum materials to better accommodate the learning needs of all students, while also expanding the geospatial pedagogical content knowledge of teachers.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    \"Figure<\/a>
    Figure 1.<\/strong> Key components of the geospatial curriculum approach.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

     <\/p>\n

    This curriculum approach aimed to develop geospatially enabled learning activities that foreground the curricular content learning and minimize the time devoted to teaching about rather than with the technology (see Sui, 1995). In addition to producing datasets and instructional materials for student use, our curricular approach calls for teacher support materials that advance their understanding of the socio-environmental subject matter addressed within each activity.<\/p>\n

    These educative curricular materials were all selected to be classroom-ready, as well as informative to the teacher: Web-based videos, text, graphics, maps, and other visual materials. When reviewing these materials, teachers can both enhance their content knowledge and begin making selections and adaptations for use in the classroom, particularly to support students who are reluctant readers, English language learners, and students with disabilities. The goal was to provide both a strong base of ready-to-use instructional materials and opportunities for modification and enhancement by teachers as they meet the needs of their particular classroom.<\/p>\n

    The SESI Activities<\/h2>\n

    The SESI activities focus on students\u2019 immediate urban environment and emphasize the Next Generation Science Standards<\/em> (NGSS Lead States, 2013) crosscutting concepts and scientific practices to the disciplinary core ideas in Human Sustainability<\/em>, as well as the C3 Framework for Social Studies (National Council for the Social Studies [NCSS], 2013). (See Figure 2.)  During SESI activities, students gather georeferenced data on social issues related to environmental science.  The topics are multidisciplinary and focus on environmental management and social justice. The investigations require students to gather information relevant to urban planning decisions in their own communities. Students are then asked to take on the role of a decision-maker and inform their thinking and reasoning about decisions based on their analysis of the data they gather, its connection to relevant social and environmental science content, and consideration of the implications for social equity, political opportunity, and environmental sustainability.<\/p>\n

    We incorporated instructional strategies such as scaffolding to support students with their data analysis interpretations. The scope of the investigations were developed so that by the end of the school year an authentic communication component could be incorporated: Students share their findings about the health of their surrounding environment with the local community in a public forum, in order to start conversations that may empower the public to advocate for further research and political action (as also in Connors, Lei, & Kelly 2012; Kolok, Schoenfuss, Propper, & Vail, 2011).<\/p>\n

    Our overarching investigation focus was land use change in our city over the past 3 centuries. This topic lends itself to a series of subinvestigations (see questions posed in Figure 2) that enable students to analyze past and present georeferenced data, carry out field data collection focused on important socio-environmental data, and analyze geospatial patterns and relationships in a Web GIS. All of these actions then come together to inform a decision-making step concerning the future of our community.<\/p>\n

    \"Figure<\/a>
    Figure 2<\/strong>. Core NGSS & NCSS alignment to the Web GIS investigations.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

     <\/p>\n

    Integration and Inquiry<\/h3>\n

    Given our goal of working across multiple content areas, we designed and developed learning activities for ninth-grade students in both science and social studies classrooms to run flexibly in one or both content areas. Each SESI activity focuses on a driving investigative question and specific content for implementation in a social studies classroom (e.g., urban zoning or land use change over time), a science classroom (e.g., ecosystem services, climate change effects, or urban heat island), or both (e.g., healthy natural and built environment or transportation routes).<\/p>\n

    Simultaneous to this content learning, each investigation develops students\u2019 geospatial process skills. These skills include accessing different geospatial applications (Collector for ArcGIS app on iPad and Web GIS maps on laptop computers), utilizing data collection procedures, displaying and navigating maps, annotating maps, analyzing data using different tools for pattern recognition and examining outliers, and constructing new data displays and visualizations. By planning learning activities that repeatedly use the same geospatial tools in inquiry-based learning, we could take advantage of sequence effects as we progressively introduced students to both the geospatial tools (interface, navigation, analytical capabilities, and so forth) and their active role in the learning process (becoming familiar with a dataset, asking questions when necessary, and constructing explanations and arguments). The continued focus on land use \u2014past, present, and future \u2014 lends itself to a variety of pressing topics related to sustainability: transportation systems, the waste stream, water supply systems, seasonal flooding, and others. Even when working within a single curriculum area, all uses of geospatial technologies in classroom instruction inherently involve integration. One level of integration is curricular: When we use tools such as GIS or Google Earth, we seamlessly draw upon our existing knowledge of multiple disciplines, including geography, geology, geophysics, history, and mathematics.<\/p>\n

    The second level of integration is conceptual: Users cycle between lower level cognitive tasks such as identifying and recalling specific data points or geographic features, higher level cognitive tasks such as pattern recognition and inference, and metacognitive monitoring as they structure their analysis to confirm or disconfirm an initial understanding. In addition to the critical thinking required by geospatial analysis, the geospatial organization of the data requires an additional layer of spatial thinking, moving from spatial primitives to more sophisticated understandings of spatial networks and hierarchy required for geospatial reasoning. (e.g., Golledge, 1995).<\/p>\n

    A final level of integration is logistical: Users work with a collection of multiple maps and datasets generated by different people at different times and often for very different purposes. For effective use with diverse urban secondary learners, existing data layers often need to be customized in order for geospatial patterns to become more readily apparent.  This customization might involve ordering layers in a Web GIS in a specific way, developing a better color scheme for data display, or combining data layers in a specified manner during analysis.<\/p>\n

    Inquiry-based learning provides an authentic process for this integration. During inquiry-based learning, students focus on a driving investigation question. They inevitably draw upon multiple areas of prior knowledge, cycle between concept development and analysis procedures, and (when appropriate) analyze the purposes and deficiencies of existing maps and datasets. To structure these processes, our geospatial curriculum approach (Figure 1) is used to guide our instructional development. In the learning activities, in order to promote capacity for the development of geospatial thinking and reasoning skills, we challenge students to use geospatial analysis for the purpose of making inferences about space, geospatial patterns, and geospatial relationships.<\/p>\n

    Role of Mentors<\/h3>\n

    Our design partnership included volunteer mentors from businesses and universities in the local area to help promote STEM-related skills within the context of the students\u2019 learning experiences. Mentors can help students recognize how STEM learning connects to real problems, social contexts, and careers. In a recent study, about two thirds of teens indicated that they may be discouraged from pursuing a STEM career because they did not know anyone who works in these fields or understand what people in these fields do (Association for Career and Technical Education, 2009).<\/p>\n

    Connections to careers can bring purpose to students\u2019 learning and help guide them in thinking about their future. This strategy can attract students who may be marginalized in traditional education and presents an opportunity for engaging more students in STEM careers (National Association of State Directors of Career Technical Education Consortium, 2013).  Successful mentoring is characterized by \u201cinstrumental support\u201d (Spencer, 2012, p. 298) in the form of role modeling, monitoring, guidance, advice, and learning through shared activities.<\/p>\n

    The mentors in our project work and research in STEM-related fields and use geospatial technologies in their occupation. For example, the local power company employs a forester to supervise and analyze the tree-related maintenance of the electrical grid. The mentors come into the classroom for multiple days during each SESI investigation. The mentors may share some content knowledge, help supervise data collection, guide students\u2019 exploration of the GIS data visualizations or analysis, or provide feedback on their explanations or final arguments. The forester, for example, can share his\/her background and work with the class (thus developing students\u2019 background knowledge) and supervise data collection and analysis during the tree-related activities.<\/p>\n

    For logistical reasons, the mentors are not expected to be present for every component of a particular investigation. Accordingly, our model calls for mentor involvement when they are available, prioritizing sustained involvement rather than cycling a large number of single-visit mentors in and out across multiple learning activities. To support the mentors, we have developed training and orientation materials for them to complete prior to working with the students. Our hope is that positive, productive mentor experiences can increase the sustainability of the project, allowing teachers to collaborate with continuing mentors side by side to design and implement new geospatially enhanced instruction long after the project is completed.<\/p>\n

    Curriculum Development Process<\/h2>\n

    As with other geospatial projects, our curriculum development followed a design partnership model. In this model, education researchers, instructional designers, content experts, and geospatial experts collaborate with classroom teachers to design and develop the SESI activities, along with consultation from school administrators and technology staff. Our partnership model focuses on collaborative design and implementation of curriculum in keeping with models of school-based reform (as also in Shear, Bell, & Linn, 2004).<\/p>\n

    Our partnership is a mechanism to leverage the diverse expertise of each contributor. This collaboration also promotes the learning of each partner in a process of codeveloping the curriculum and instructional practices that will be implemented in the classroom (see also McLaughlin & Mitra, 2001).  <\/strong>In addition, this level of collaboration and coordination is necessary to manage multiple and overlapping issues of technical implementation, school management, and curriculum design and development.<\/p>\n

    The initial stages of our project were focused on managing the information technology infrastructure of the school. SESI activities required new iPads to be bound to the school district\u2019s network, while still allowing flexible updating and app management from members of our project team. The project also required an organizational account for the school to use Esri\u2019s ArcGIS.com<\/a> Web GIS infrastructure. The access is free upon request to K-12 schools as a continued part of Esri\u2019s participation in the Obama-era ConnectED initiative (Fitzpatrick, 2014).<\/p>\n

    With an institution-level account, one can obtain a single URL for all work in the Web-based GIS environment to gain significant organizational advantages that include central control of shared resources such as datasets and maps that aid team management and the ability to manage both individual student accounts and class-level groupings. A final piece of infrastructure was developing websites for hosting instructional materials and the mentor orientation and training materials.<\/p>\n

    As the technical and logistical details were being worked out, we began charting our development cycle for the SESI activities. The first step was to gather information about the existing curriculum in both the environmental science and the social studies classes. In this area, the teachers were the experts, unpacking their content, objectives, and assessment practices for the design and development team.<\/p>\n

    The next step was a collaborative brainstorming process, identifying topics for the SESI investigations, locating datasets, and outlining ideas for data collection, visualization, and analysis. Following this brainstorming, we selected and organized the content, focusing on those topics that appeared to be the best fit for teachers\u2019 existing curriculum and had strong potential for engaging the students.<\/p>\n

    From these topic selections, the development team began sketching out the SESI investigations, addressing the following questions in a collaborative planning document:<\/p>\n