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.