The authors' school's second-grade science curriculum has always focused on trees and their role in the ecosystem during the first half of the year. Curricular goals have largely emphasized what students ought to "know" by the end of the semester, such as identifying the parts of a tree, describing the process of photosynthesis, and…

This paper reports on the use of teacher-written "cases" as evaluation data sources. Cases are first hand, candid, dramatic, highly readable accounts of events or a series of events in teaching. Eight teaching cases were collected which had been written by new teachers who graduated from the Maryland Collaborative for Teacher Preparation…