BLOSSOMS has received funding to develop five Blended Teacher Professional Learning (TPL) modules that can be used by districts and schools in states across the country that have signed on to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Many teachers we have met in these states agree that the new standards will greatly improve overall science education. Unfortunately, they also believe that they have not received adequate training to incoorporate these standards into their lessons. The BLOSSOMS Blended Teacher Professional Learning model is designed to be a highly scaleable solution to this growing training need - providing an easily accessible online package of videos and accompanying guides and resources that will enable education leaders across the country to organize teacher workshops on NGSS implementation. The five new BLOSSOMS NGSS-aligned video lessons will be in the topic areas of Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Earth Science and Engineering. You can view the first new video lesson of this initiative here—"Hanging by a Thread", a physics lesson. Each of these five videos will serve as the anchor event of a domain-related Blended TPL NGSS workshop. Participating teachers will experience the lessons just as their students would, allowing them to understand firsthand the pedagogical shifts required by NGSS. Each of the BLOSSOMS Blended TPL modules will also provide a video of the anchor lesson being taught by a master teacher in a live classroom, as well as video interviews with that master teacher and the students participating in the class. Extensive guidance will be provided in written form for facilitators planning to run a workshop via these online TPL modules, and participating teachers will be required to bring a lesson of their own to the workshop in order to spend time applying what they have learned to their own classroom teaching. For updates on this initiative, visit the MIT BLOSSOMS website or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
