Teacher Collaboration and the Science Rotation

The Question

What has been the impact of the science rotation on our school climate, teacher development, and student learning in science?

Summary

This paper will examine the effects of our group of elementary school teachers’ effort to completely overhaul our approach to teaching science in the upper-elementary grades. We realized that we had to do something very different to prepare our students for the California STAR standardized science test, which takes place only in the fifth grade. We didn’t like the idea of standardized tests exclusively dictating our curriculum, but we knew it wasn’t fair for the fifth graders to face the science test unprepared each year. One teacher said that she had heard of teachers collaborating to form a science rotation. She explained that each teacher could choose one topic to focus on all year, and then the students would rotate through each class in cycles. Suddenly, many ideas started popping up and our conversation grew more dynamic.