To organize for the improvement of science instruction teachers need opportunities to collaboratively learn from practice, in practice, and to engage in the revision of classroom tools. In this paper, we examine how a professional learning community (PLC), comprised of middle school teachers and researchers, worked on the improvement of Ambitious Science Teaching (AST) practices and developed instructional practices and tools supporting model‐based inquiry. This paper focuses on the first year of a 5‐year research–practice partnership in which teachers and researchers routinely coplanned, cotaught, and codebriefed science lessons via improvement cycles. We conducted an analysis of teacher‐designed tools, reflective talk, and classroom observations. All teachers engaged in increasingly sophisticated forms of AST practices over the year and began to use a similar tool to scaffold scientific modeling with students. Yet, there were two distinct variations that evolved with grade‐level teams. One team developed a practice and tool supporting students’ final form articulation of ideas with models and the other team developed a practice and tools supporting the revision of models over a unit of instruction. We argue that both grade‐level teams engaged in productive learning and that PLC benefited from having different perspectives on relatively similar practices for scaffolding students’ scientific modeling. On the basis of the findings, we propose three key components to a practice‐based theory for how PLCs negotiate tools as a part of the improvement of teaching practices: anchoring improvement in a particular tool and practice, supporting variation in teacher learning and making teachers’ pedagogical reasoning explicit.

中文翻译：

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建立基于实践的理论，探讨专业学习社区如何参与科学建模工具和实践的改进

为了组织科学教学的改进，教师需要有机会在实践中共同学习实践，并参与修订课堂工具。在本文中，我们研究了由中学教师和研究人员组成的专业学习社区（PLC）如何致力于改善野心科学教学（AST）的实践，并开发了支持基于模型的探究的教学实践和工具。本文侧重于为期5年的研究与实践合作伙伴关系的第一年，在该伙伴关系中，教师和研究人员通过改进周期例行地共同计划，编写科目和编写简报的科学课。我们对教师设计的工具，反思性演讲和课堂观察进行了分析。在过去的一年中，所有教师都从事越来越复杂的AST实践形式，并开始使用类似的工具为学生建立科学的模型。但是，随着年级团队的发展，存在两种截然不同的变化。一个团队开发了一种实践和工具来支持学生用模型最终表达思想，而另一团队开发了一种实践和工具来支持在教学单元上修改模型。我们认为，两个年级团队都从事生产性学习，而PLC受益于对相对相似的脚手架学生科学建模实践的不同见解。根据调查结果，我们提出了基于实践的理论的三个关键组成部分，以说明PLC如何在改进教学实践的过程中协商工具：