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Video - The Fulcrum Institute: Changing the Lives of Teachers



This seven-minute video highlights the work of the Fulcrum Institute for Education in Science. Teachers speak about how attending the institute has affected their pedagogy as well as their personal intellectual growth.

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.