How do we develop engaging science and engineering curriculum for all students?

Challenge

The U.S. student population is growing increasingly diverse, and teachers must be prepared to teach and accurately assess students’ developing science proficiencies. The National Comprehensive Center works with states and Regional Centers to enhance the quality of instruction, close achievement gaps, and improve educational outcomes for all students. To this end, we deliver high-quality universal and targeted capacity-building services and products, and work with key education stakeholders to leverage expertise and resources and, ultimately, maximize results.

As the diversity of classrooms increases, teachers must be ready to provide learning opportunities and activities that make all students feel included and provide access to inclusive learning opportunities.

To address the lack of structures and resources to support teachers to design and use equitable and engaging curriculum materials that reach all learners in science, technology, engineering, and math, including computer science (STEM+CS), the Designing for Diversity (D4D) team will provide tools and resources for districts that integrate design principles for equity and inclusion into science and engineering instruction.

Solution

The D4D project has released 3 white papers based around an Equity and Inclusion Framework for Curriculum Design (EI-CD) to show teachers how to design and use equitable and engaging curriculum materials in STEM+CS that reach all learners.

The team will develop aligned professional development resources and tools to help states and districts put the principles into practice.

We will also work with our Regional Center partners to disseminate and build on the D4D work.

Results

The project will increase state and local capacity to use the EI-CD approach that integrates design principles of equity and inclusion into the design and modification of STEM+CS curriculum materials.

Our goal is that state- and district-level science supervisors, curriculum coordinators, and teachers will be able to support teachers to either develop their own curriculum materials or modify already existing curriculum materials to be used for instruction.