How does leadership emerge and develop among university STEM faculty working to adopt evidence-based teaching practices? This qualitative case study examines academic departments as sites for instructional change, viewing leadership as an emergent property of the relationships within a social system. The researcher adopted a dual lens of McElroy…

Social media platforms like Twitter offer benefits for promoting and sharing scientific research. Each user becomes an instant news source for their work, and are able to report lab updates, news, and discoveries in near real time, increasing the visibility and citations of one's research and allowing for direct and public engagement with the…

We share a case study on our use of three reflective questions to demonstrate ways in which simple questions can be coded to reveal rich evidence of impact and engagement. At the end of a three-hour inclusive teaching practices workshop for 23 faculty and administrators from a single science department, 22 participants completed an anonymous…

There is a severe shortage of Black scientists in the United States. Amid the recent national movement to dismantle systemic racism and racial injustices, many scientists publicly highlighted the prevalence of racist learning environments in STEM, contributing to the underrepresentation of Black students in STEM fields. Acknowledging this…

While there is a wealth of research evidencing the benefits of active-learning approaches, the extent to which these teaching practices are adopted in the sciences is not well known. The aim of this study is to establish an evidential baseline of teaching practices across a bachelor of science degree program at a large research-intensive…

In response to the need for a scalable, institutionally supported model of educational change, the Science Education Initiative (SEI) was created as an experiment in transforming course materials and faculty practices at two institutions--University of Colorado Boulder (CU) and University of British Columbia. We find that this departmentally…

In China, science educators as a professional group were originally referred to as academic staff responsible for teaching the subject-based science teaching methods course at the related science departments at teachers' universities. In this study, a biographic method was used to approach the professional life of Zhixin Liu, who was a senior…

Graduate teaching assistants are often left out of the science teacher education reform agenda, but these science educators are responsible for significant amounts of undergraduate instruction especially at large research universities. Within science departments specifically, a number of courses and laboratories are taught by graduate teaching…

In this article we take a critical look at education for sustainable development (ESD), which is a more contested idea than policy makers might have us believe. After a brief examination of the history of the term, we look at the recent Ofsted report into how it is being implemented (or not) in UK schools. We examine why it is a contested term and…

To most people in the author's profession of Special Education, the "D" means "disabilities." At The Lab School of Washington, the "D" means "different"--learning "differently" and teaching "differently." Sally Smith, the founder of the school, had this uncanny ability to see things in her staff that they could not. The year the author graduated…

Significant challenges to education transformation in lecture-oriented science departments include initiating and supporting a dialogue about teaching and learning among faculty whose priorities are primarily research. The authors established a faculty learning community through which participants made significant changes to how they think about…

Significant involvement of students in the development and implementation of college alcohol prevention strategies is largely untested, despite recommendations by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and others. Objective: The purpose of the Pragmatics Project was to test a student engagement model for developing and implementing…

This study explores teacher professional learning within the workplace context of a science department community. Workplace learning is considered in terms of the construction and flow of information about science, pedagogy and the relationships of science to the wider community. Implications for establishing sound conditions for teacher workplace…

In this article we investigate the changing context for teacher professional learning potentially afforded by the conceptual change from professional development to professional learning. Using a narrative case study methodology, we utilize the "Best Evidence Synthesis Iteration" developed by Timperley, Wilson, Barrar and Fung (2007) to analyse…

The aim of the work presented here was to devise an activity associated with factors affecting boiling points. The intervention used a four-step constructivist-based teaching strategy, which was subsequently evaluated by a cohort of students. Data collection consisted of application of a purpose designed questionnaire consisting of four open-ended…