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Community Norms

Members in this teacher community will honor the norms of a collaborative community found on page 26 in the BSCS Biology Teacher Handbook. Specific practices that support our community include:

Be Kind, Inviting, and Inclusive

  • Teaching a new curriculum can be hard! Be patient with yourself and others as we work together to improve our practice.

  • BSCS will remove any content deemed inappropriate or inconsistent with the purposes of this teacher community. 

  • BSCS reserves the right to block anyone’s access to this teacher community website at any time for any reason.​

Be a Learner, Notice and Wonder:

  • Share your learnings and aha’s with others.

  • Ask questions!

Synthesize and Analyze Gaps

  • Share your successes - both yours and those of your students! What have you figured out so far?

  • Share your challenges - both yours and those of your students! What do you still need to figure out?

Norms for a Collaborative Community

Characteristic of a Collaborative Community

Respectful

Norms

  • We make sure that everyone feels safe, seen, and valued.

  • We presume others have positive intentions.

  • We recognize that we think, share, and represent our ideas in different ways.

  • We provide each other with support and encouragement.

  • We critique the ideas we are working with, not the people we are working with.

Equitable

  • We pause to provide others time to think and share.

  • We paraphrase to acknowledge and understand the perspectives of others.

  • We pay attention to self and others by

    • Monitoring how much we are speaking

    • Encouraging other voices we haven’t heard

Shared Inquiry

  • We pose questions

    • To explore our own thinking

    • To help us understand others’ ideas

  • We provide data as evidence to support our ideas.

  • We ask for evidence from others.

  • We base our critique on the strength of evidence and science ideas.

  • We are open to changing our minds in light of new evidence.

  • We challenge ourselves to think in new ways.

Committed to Community

  • ​We come prepared to work toward a common goal.

  • We place ideas on the table, even if we are not certain we are correct, to help us all learn.

  • We use and build on others’ ideas.

  • We identify areas where we agree and disagree to develop consensus.

Best Practices for the BSCS Biology Teacher Community

Content and Privacy Practices

  • We will not use school contact information provided in registration for any purpose other than verifying the identity of the registrant. 

  • We will not use any contact information from members or share it with third parties without requesting and receiving explicit permission from the member. This includes Kendall Hunt Publishing Company. 

  • We will only send email to community members for two purposes: 1) to send notifications about new content on this website and 2) to seek permission to contact a member for some other purpose. 

Content Ownership and Permissions

  • ​All content posted to the website remains the property of its creator. This means that duplication or distribution by a member is a violation of the creator’s ownership rights unless the creator explicitly provides permission to use or distribute it. 

  • All members are responsible for obtaining permission from the owners of materials before sharing them here. If BSCS finds any content posted without permission of the owner, we will remove it. 

  • BSCS Science Learning hereby provides all registered members of the BSCS Biology Teacher Community Website with the right to download and reproduce all materials that BSCS posts on this website unless the materials are accompanied by a separate licensing notice. These rights to download and reproduce materials are restricted to use by the registered member themself for educational purposes with K-16 students or a professional development setting with teachers. Any other distribution or reproduction is prohibited without prior permission from BSCS Science Learning. BSCS Science Learning retains all other rights to the materials that it posts.

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