Epilogue: Finding Your Own Sources of Support

Everyone involved in writing and producing this practitioners’ guide, including the educators who have shared their experiences in its pages, has done so in hopes of inspiring and empowering you to try something new—or validating what you’re already doing. Whether you’re relatively new to the instructional approaches in this guide or are already putting some of them into action, you may still, at times, find this work to be challenging. The strategies described in this guide may call for different ways of interacting with students than what you’re accustomed to. Remember, you don’t have to do everything at once, and you can choose or adapt the strategies you think will work best for you and your students.

Every chapter of this guide has made the point in some way that students learn more deeply when they talk together, collaborate on investigations and design tasks, and jointly construct explanations and arguments. The same rationale applies to you. As you implement the strategies in the chapters, your greatest source of ideas, strength, and stamina is often your colleagues.

Whether through an established professional learning community, grade-level team meetings, informal sharing of ideas, or an online community, many educators who are competent and comfortable with three-dimensional strategies credit their colleagues as a main source of support.

One such teacher is Marian Hobbes Moore, a K–5 STEM instructional coach in an urban, Southeastern district and a leader of a districtwide STEM teacher learning community. Many teachers in her district, especially those who taught the early grades, were intimated by the prospect of managing this approach to instruction and letting children handle science and engineering materials, says Hobbes Moore. What helped a lot, she explained, was when the teachers worked as teams and shared ideas and materials through the teacher learning community.

The biggest thing that was the most beneficial for all of us was being able to collaborate—knowing that we could call somebody and say, “Hey, I want to do this; do you have any ideas?” . . . You don’t have to be alone in doing this. And you shouldn’t be intimidated to do it. Because it is doable, especially if you start on a small scale and then build up.¹

So, join or organize a group of colleagues to study and try out the science and engineering instructional strategies described in this guide. Exchange ideas and materials—and successes and flops—with a team or even one trusted co-worker. If your school or district has a science resource person or coach, take advantage of all they can offer.

Remind yourself that you bring many assets to this work. The National Academies’ Framework, guides like this one, professional learning providers, and other reliable sources can provide ideas from research and expert practitioners to enhance your instruction. But you know your students and your context. If you merge what these resources can offer with what you already know, it can have a powerful, positive impact on your students and on your own teaching.

Lastly, cultivate the joy and wonder, the brilliance and strengths, that exist in preschool and elementary students—and in yourself. Take a lesson from a teacher who seized a serendipitous moment to kindle children’s curiosity. While her students were taking an online assessment, she noticed that one child kept glancing toward the windows. She followed his eyes and saw a fox walking up the hill outside the school:

I looked up at everybody and said, “Fox break!” And they all got up, went straight to the windows, and we’re watching the fox walk across the hill . . . It was just this moment of awe in watching the animal in motion and having a talk—“What do you think it’s doing?” . . . And so, wonder, right?²

So, rise and thrive with science. This is hard work; you can do it—and don’t forget the fox breaks!

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¹ Interview, Feb. 11, 2022.

² Interview, Jan. 12, 2022.