Puddles to Floods is a 2-year pilot program that is equal parts professional development for teachers and science summer school for students. The overarching goal of the program is to support 3rd through 5th grade teachers and students in developing their capacity for field-based experiences while learning about stormwater flooding in New Orleans. 

Teacher Learning

Puddles to Floods is a summer institute that supports elementary school teachers in understanding how and why to lead student engagement in NGSS-aligned science practices and helps them develop the belief, confidence, and skill to guide students through a learning process that is motivated by their questions and ideas.

Teachers receive daily live coaching in the classroom from program leaders and participate in four hours of professional learning each afternoon. These sessions provide opportunities to analyze student work, use data to adjust lesson plans, and practice particularly tricky aspects of the curriculum while receiving feedback from their fellow teachers and program leaders.

Curriculum

Ripple Effect team members used OpenSciEd’s instructional model to structure the 4-week unit. In this approach, students create an initial model, then use their findings from investigations to communicate their increasingly sophisticated understanding of an anchoring phenomenon. Educators from Louisiana Sea Grant and UNO’s Coastal Education Program helped build content knowledge and test field-based data collection protocols early in the curriculum design process. And the leaders of Groundwork NOLA and Healthy Community Services taught students about green infrastructure through a field trip at one of their project sites.

Ripple Effect worked with longtime partner BSCS Science Learning, the lead institution in the OpenSciEd Developers Consortium, to identify a curriculum design template that encouraged maximum fidelity to the intent of Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and Louisiana State Science Standards (LSSS). This included color coding the lesson-level performance expectations to match each of the NGSS dimensions (science and engineering practices, disciplinary core ideas, and crosscutting concepts) and then detailing how those dimensions could be seen or heard in student work and discourse throughout the unit.

Field-based Learning

Teachers begin Puddles to Floods with four days of field-based learning, giving them an opportunity to familiarize themselves with the science content knowledge and investigation protocols before students arrive. Throughout the course of the unit, a two-part field-based learning structure scaffolds the experience for both teachers and students. Because the unit asks students to figure out why an urban environment floods but a more natural forest environment nearby does not during the same rainstorm, classes start by conducting a series of investigations into the surface types and elevations in their own schoolyard, an environment with which they are intimately familiar. Once they’ve gained familiarity with the protocols, they conduct the same series of investigations in the natural environment.

District-level Partnership

Since 2021, Ripple Effect has worked closely with KIPP New Orleans administrators, school-based instructional leaders, and elementary science teachers to design and implement a series of district-wide interventions to improve the quality of science instruction. This effort has included modifying curriculum to create more opportunities for students to investigate their own questions about locally relevant scientific phenomena and using professional development to increase teacher capacity to identify, evaluate, and leverage student ideas to deepen their understanding of science concepts. The Puddles to Floods program is an extension of these efforts and was piloted at KIPP Morial with approximately 50 students throughout the district in the summer of 2023.