• Positioning Culture, Families & Communities as Rightfully Belonging. The unit begins by having students learn from their surroundings and families, as they interview family members about their knowledge of water scarcity across the world, and take stock of how they use water in their homes. This pedagogical move intentionally incorporates parents and caregivers as knowledgeable. Maestra Blanca reported that parents appreciated seeing the map with their ideas in the classroom on back-to-school night. 
• Building Classroom Cultures of Interdependence & Care. The introductory lessons ask students to consider connections among family stories, fostering a sense of shared experiences across cultural backgrounds. Placed at the beginning of the year, this helped students learn about interdependence and care for one another. 
• Broadening Languages of Science & Literacy. Part of building a community of care is carefully reading one another’s family stories. The teacher supports language and literacy by giving students opportunities to read carefully, highlight similarities and differences, and then use what they learned to inform their models. This supported reading to connect. 
• Fostering Interdependent Nature-Culture Relations. The unit supports students in considering the needs of nature and later the rights of nature, as they engage in world-building (Frausto Aceves & Morales-Doyle, 2022).
• Recognizing that Power, Historicity & Futures Matter. Students reflect on possible futures for the planet and possible solutions, considering what they can do personally, as well as looking critically at the role of industry in driving water scarcity in Latin America.

After co-teaching the first part of the lesson, we gathered to discuss what we noticed about how students engaged with the phenomenon and with one another.

Participating Teachers’ Learning

Host Maestra Blanca’s learning

Teachers participating in Blanca’s Studio Day considered how to shift their own instruction.

• Teacher Moira’s Home Connections 

After attending Blanca’s studio, teacher Moira was inspired by the home connections Blanca’s lessons built on. So, she sent home letters to families asking for their personal connections to landforms and why it’s meaningful to them. Teacher Moira plans to use these home connections to do a mini-study later in the unit, and students can use those stories to add to their initial landform models. 

• Teacher Iman’s Restructured Unit Planning, Deeper Learning, and Students as Scientists

Since attending Blanca’s studio, I have practiced focusing on a section of our unit more in-depth rather than trying to speed through several sections. I think this offers an opportunity for deeper learning and observing. I would like to continue incorporating opportunities for students to see themselves as scientists and to incorporate more family engagement. 

• Teacher Nancy on Expanding Science Lessons and Showing the Scale of Impacts 

After attending Blanca’s studio, teacher Nancy kept thinking about how to help her students understand the scale of the central issue (e.g., the amount of water used up by data centers). During the studio, teacher Nancy noticed that when students were thinking about the dam (a water supply), only one student had seen a dam in person. It was thus difficult for students to picture just how big dams are. So, teacher Nancy is thinking about taking her science class outside (for her unit on salmon and dam removals in the PNW) next year, so students can compare a dam to the size of a building for scale.

• Teacher Christina’s Adaptation of Just-in-time Mini Lessons on Environmental Impacts 

After seeing Blanca’s lesson on water pollution and how she added the mini lesson about how industry and technology affected a large part of it, I brought that knowledge into my classroom as well. When my classroom was learning about the geography of the world, the conversation of latitude/ longitude and the association with climate came up. In that specific lesson, I included a mini lesson about climate change and included the information about industry, consumerism, and technology impact that was shared in Blanca’s classroom. Especially since I teach in an area where many of the students’ parents work in the tech industry, it brought up great conversation and input. The students then chimed in with their own experiences with climate change and how they have been noticing big weather patterns throughout the past years

• Teacher Christina’s Adaptation of Visual and Language Support for Key Concepts

When I was in Blanca’s classroom, I could clearly tell how useful the wall space posted with science concepts was for her students. The students I was working with were constantly referring back to the posters to look up the correct spelling and definition for their scientific explanations. This year, I have the largest number of emerging ML students, and adding visuals that support language has been very helpful to add. Also, using my bulletin board space and continuously updating it to match what I am teaching has been helpful. The curriculum I use does not include pictures with its vocabulary words. Therefore, even taking the extra time to add them myself has been helpful not just for my ML students but all of my students. It is also a resource I can continuously use next year as well.

Studios are premised on the idea that teachers and researchers both seek to provide joyful, dignity-affirming learning for students (Scipio et al., 2025; Keifert et al., 2021; Espinoza et al., 2020). They are a form of job-embedded professional development that takes place during a school day. Before the studio, the Coach or School Team Leader facilitates a common planning meeting with teachers from the school; they design a unit of instruction and lessons for the studio day. On the day of the studio, teachers and others attending studio days (e.g., classroom teachers, coaches, researchers, administrators) engage in multiple rounds of co-planning, co-teaching, and co-debriefing and real-time feedback. To learn more about the studio process, please see our how-to page.

To support teachers in the broader network in learning from Blanca’s Studio Day, we created a video and a 2-page summary.

• Frausto Aceves, A., & Morales-Doyle, D. (2022). More than civil engineering and civic reasoning: World-building in middle school STEM. Occasional Paper Series, (48), 13-32.
• Morales-Doyle, D. (2024). Transformative science teaching: A catalyst for justice and sustainability. Harvard Education Press.
• Von Esch, K., Betancourt, C., Thompson, J., Varghese, M., Li, H-S, & Venegas-Weber, P. (2025). Recontextualization in Multilingual Science Teacher Professional Learning, Science Education, Special Issue: Teacher learning and practice within organizational contexts.
• Venegas-Weber, P. & Thompson, J. (2024). Bilingual, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color teacher candidates’ translanguaging selves: Working with their multilingual assets and identities as future elementary science teachers, Journal of Research on Science Teaching Special Issue: Examining translanguaging in science and engineering education research.
• Venegas-Weber, P., Betancourt, C., Gonzales, G., Thompson, J., Varghese, M., & Li, H-J. (2024). Broadening what counts as science: Developing teacher candidates’ translanguaging stances in their Teacher Education Program towards translingual, multimodal, interdisciplinary, and justice-centered elementary science practices. Teaching and Teacher Education, 1-48.
• Venegas-Weber, P. & Thompson, J. “Unleashing the potential within”: Latine Teachers’ Pedagogical Integration of Their Students’ Language(s), Literacy Practices, and Content Knowledge in Two-Way Bilingual Education (TWBE) Science Education. Peabody
  Journal of Education.