CASTL, the Collaboration for Ambitious Science Teaching and Learning, was launched in 2018 as a regional extension of Washington’s NSF-funded Math and Science Partnership, PASTL. The initiative focuses on engaging teachers in Ambitious Science Teaching (AST) to assess student engagement in rigorous science instruction and provide peer support to enhance professional practice.
In March 2020, as we prepared for our third collaboration day, Washington State closed all schools due to the COVID-19 pandemic, halting our network of over 150 teachers’ activities. Teachers persisted and creativity re-invented school for remote learning. But, the diverse tools used across diverse districts made it hard to maintain cohesion within our network. Over the next four years, teachers and communities rebuilt schools and learning communities, rebuilding what it meant to be in a learning community.
But 2024-25 felt different. We decided it was time to bring our Ambitious Science Teachers back, with a twist! During the interim, some districts continued using teacher-developed AST units, while others adopted Amplify Science or OpenSciEd. Interestingly, all three approaches share a similar goal: to motivate student engagement in sense-making to understand and explain real-world phenomena.
NWESD is hosting our first two Ambitious Science Teaching Reflective Planning Days in nearly five years. Network members Jamie Yoos (of Bellingham School District) and Amy Peterson (of Edmonds School District) agreed to facilitate our days and we’ve succeeded in gathering a small, but enthusiastic, group of teachers to collaborate, share student work in critical friend groups, and reflect on how they can transform their practice.
Samples of student work used to form the day’s working groups.
This year, we’re using the Reflective Planning Days to gather feedback from participants about their needs and those of their colleagues. Next year and beyond, we aim to build on this success, bringing more colleagues back and recruiting more teachers into practices that can sustain and transform Next Generation Science Standards-aligned science instruction.
Our shared commitment and our shared goal is that students are meaningfully engaged science (explaining a something about the natural world) and engineering (designing solutions to real-world problems).
