Leading Science PD with Genuine Wonder

As a science teacher, you’ve probably sat through a professional development (PD) session where you were asked to wear different hats: be a learner for this part, a teacher for that one. But the problem is that you aren’t actually a student—you already know the content, so pretending to be confused doesn’t help you understand what students are feeling when they get stuck.

If the goal of a PD session is to help teachers lead students through confusion to an understanding of content that lasts, then teachers need to live that same process: to experience the same productive struggle they are being asked to facilitate in their own classrooms, and to feel how the process of discovering something makes the information stick.

STARTING WITH A PHENOMENON

I’ve found that the key to leading this kind of effective PD is to present something that genuinely challenges the teachers in the room, and, as the facilitator, not just give them an answer right away, but allow them to discover it on their own. When planning a session, I start with a phenomenon—something we will look at together and try to understand. Through this phenomenon, we will practice productive struggle.

When I’m choosing a phenomenon to start off my PD session, I don’t look for something obscure that no one has ever heard of. Instead, I look for something that teachers can get curious about.

One of my favorites: I set a heavy disk spinning on a curved mirror. I don’t introduce it as an activity but only say that I found it and want everyone to tell me what they notice. Then I go quiet, and stay quiet until the group kicks off their sense-making. They point out the obvious, then start glancing at each other to check whether they are missing something. Eventually someone says it: It sounds like it is speeding up.

LEAVING SPACE FOR TEACHERS TO THINK

The key to a successful PD session based on phenomena is less about the actual phenomena and more about how you engage with them alongside teachers. With the spinning disk, I didn’t explain what it was, what I wanted the students to notice, or why something specific was happening. Instead, I just left space for them to start noticing things and asking questions.

When someone says, “It sounds like it is speeding up,” I don’t explain it. I don’t even say “Say more” yet. I just say what I’m actually thinking: “Right?! I hear that too.” I get a few nods, and everyone leans in to listen. That’s when I say something like… “Wait, how can something sound like it is speeding up?”

Here is something worth knowing before you try this: You do not have the full account of why a spinning disk holds on longer than it should, or why the sound seems to accelerate while the disk is still falling. Neither does the physics literature, which has been actively contested since a letter to Nature in 2000 sparked a debate about the dominant dissipation mechanism that has not fully closed.

You are not performing confusion the way teachers are asked to when they are told to put on their student hat during PD. You are standing inside a genuinely open scientific question, and the teachers in the room can feel the difference. The second they sense you are waiting for them to arrive at an answer already in your head, the thinking stops being theirs and becomes a guessing game about what is in yours.

WONDERING ALONGSIDE TEACHERS

That’s why a phenomenon like this works: You can stand in front of a room of experts and wonder at it for real, without the smirk that says, I know where this is going and I am waiting for you to catch up. Adults find that smirk in half a second. It is the tell that ends the thinking, because now the game is guess what the facilitator knows.

The trouble is you usually do know. So the question is not whether you can find phenomena you do not understand. It is whether you can keep wondering at the ones you do. And you can, because the answer you were handed almost never goes as deep as you think.

Things fall because of gravity, everyone agrees, and gravity is the name we gave the question, not the answer to it. Newton himself would not say what caused it. The confident answer is a place to stop, not the bottom of anything, and your job is to not stop there in front of the room, out loud, first.

So the move is not to hunt for phenomena you cannot explain. It is to ask what is really happening one layer past where the room wants to stop, and to want the answer as much as they do. You go first, showing what it looks and sounds like to be genuinely curious alongside those you are leading, so they can do it in front of a class. The moment your wondering is genuine, the room stops guessing what is in your head and starts thinking with you. That is the whole move.

The learning that lasts is the thing the teachers in the room came to understand on their own, through genuine curiosity and exploration. And that is what we hope teachers will bring to their own classrooms—the restraint to not just tell students answers, but present them with something interesting, and wonder alongside them all the way to discovery.