The Fulcrum Institute for Leadership in Science Education
For more information, see http://fulcrum.tufts.edu

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Tufts University along with TERC, and Malden Public School District (of Malden, Massachusetts), have created the Fulcrum Institute for Education in Science, a two-year series of graduate courses for experienced K-8 teachers funded by the Math/Science Partnership Program of National Science Foundation.

The Institute aims to prepare a group of Educators in Science who will implement and lead research-centered science learning and teaching in their schools and districts. Participants advance their professional knowledge and status through the Institute's credit-bearing, three-course sequence.

The Vision
Institute graduates will become teacher leaders who understand science more deeply and promote it in their classrooms and schools. Such leaders know from their personal experience that thinking needs to be grounded in observation, yet nurtured by competing claims and possibilities.

These practitioners elicit students' ideas about scientific phenomena, encourage students to make careful observations, to draw their own conclusions, and to discuss their evidence, methods and interpretations with fellow students; and they skillfully intervene -- through example, explanation, questioning. They document their own teaching and students' learning and share their data and findings with colleagues, including pre-service teachers in their classrooms.

These educators regard science as more than a body of existing knowledge; they view it as a means for understanding phenomena, for figuring things out in the world around them.

The Course Documents
The Fulcrum Institute for Education in Science is a series of three graduate courses created by Tufts, TERC, and the Malden Public Schools. The Institute has been funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation and has educated over 100 K-8 teachers since 2005.

You are invited to explore the course documents which were utilized throughout the Institute. This is presented for educators to further their own science knowledge, understand how teachers, children and scientists develop scientific ideas, and develop leadership in teaching science. Science inquiry is at the heart of the Institute. It is the goal of the Institute to assist Educators in Science to implement and lead research-centered science learning and teaching in their schools and districts.

The terms of the grant allow all materials produced by the Fulcrum project to be freely available to the public for its use.

ED211 - Some of What Matters about Matter: Intensive Properties (download info)
ED212 - Conceptual Distinctions: The Case of Heat and Temperature (download info)
ED213 - Earth's Energy Balance (download info)