In collaboration with an urban public school, teacher candidates at a nearby university created a social-emotional skills project called Knight Brigade. The author discusses the project planning, implementation, and results as part of this ongoing partnership.

Plate tectonics is the organizing paradigm of geosciences, but it is also conceptually complex, and students often struggle with developing a system level understanding of the earth. This article reports on research designed to create a characterization of the different levels of sophistication around plate tectonics in the form of a learning…