ABSTRACT
Our work addresses two comprehensive problems of changing learning and teaching in schools. We have been working in upper elementary, middle and high school classrooms (a) to define a promising educational innovation, project-based science (PBS), where learners engage in long-term, multidisciplinary investigations that answer important intellectual questions through collaboration over extended time (Blumenfeld et al., 1991; Krajcik, Blumenfeld, Marx, & Soloway, 1994; Simon & Schiffer, 1991); and (b) to examine the processes by which teachers come to understand this innovation and the challenges and dilemmas they face in enacting it in their classrooms (Blumenfeld, Krajcik, Marx, & Soloway, 1994; Krajcik et al., 1994; Marx et al., 1994). Based on these experiences and the literature on teacher development, we designed a process (called CEER) for working with teachers that emphasizes cycles of collaboration, enactment, and reflection (Blumenfeld et al., 1994; Krajcik et al., 1994) and developed materials, including videotapes with accompanying commentary and case studies written by teachers and researchers (Ladewski, Krajcik, & Harvey, 1994; Scott, 1994). Finally, we developed a suite of computational tools, the Project-Support Environment (PSE), that serves as a teacher’s workbench, housing a range of integrated teacher tools that provides opportunities for teachers to plan projects, learn features of PBS, develop new visions of, and strategies for, classroom practices through studying multimedia cases, reflect in a personal electronic journal, and collaborate with others through telecommunications.
