Experience Science
Study the World

Collaborate Science offers experiential projects to afford students a real-world understanding of science, technology, engineering and math. A Driving Question begins each unit and lesson set and requires a solution at the end, so students must apply and demonstrate their knowledge by answering questions, connecting phenomena to their local community, and developing artifacts aligned with Performance Expectations to solve problems.

Instead of answering “what” questions with a single response, students are challenged to wonder “how” and “why,” giving them opportunities to apply the new information they’ve learned.

Professional development is at the heart of the Collaborate Science curriculum. Immersive and sustained, it recognizes the need for the teacher’s role to shift into a facilitator of the student discovery experience. It’s led by the driving question: how can we create a learner-centered classroom through projects? And it supports a new way of teaching — where students bring wonder to the classroom.

Adults learn best by engaging in a similar learning experience as their students. So teachers wear “student” hats as they engage in an abridged set of lessons that leverage the curriculum features, experience firsthand how learning unfolds in their classrooms, and learn how to apply the ML-PBL teaching method.

Integrating multiple literacies — such as communication, argumentation, design, and presentation — engages students in real-life scientific disciplines as they practice making sense of ideas and phenomena. Collaborate Science team projects allow students to work together, talk, read, write, listen to others, and practice providing and accepting feedback. As students share individual prior knowledge, it enriches the active, group learning experience. This is a comprehensive learning experience that transforms the classroom into the next generation of problem-solving thinkers and doers.

Collaborate Science enables students to actively engage in their own learning as they make choices and decisions. Each project promotes student understanding of concepts and skills while also serving as a performance-based assessment. These projects are the core of the academic work, developing student understanding of key concepts and skills all the way through the process.

Driving questions provide a roadmap for students to follow as they investigate solutions, and the classroom becomes a workshop — teams of students produce “things,” test their hypothesis, solve problems together, and critique their team’s work. The culminating projects demonstrate what individual students have learned, the content or skills they are struggling with, and where there are gaps for teachers to address. This curriculum structure naturally leads to differentiated instruction, while the hands-on synergetic experience lets students “do” science, not just read about it.