Engage. Equipping the next generation for active engagement in science. Periodic report number 2.

Shifting school science towards RRI \nENGAGE was aimed to give the next generation of students the knowledge, skills and attitudes to deal with socio-scientific issues in their lives, and develop informed opinions on emerging science and technology. ENGAGE’s goal is to embed Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) within the science curriculum and change the way science is taught. Through a set of innovative strategies, we have attempted to shift the emphasis from transmitting a body of scientific knowledge towards applying science to issues that matter to students. At the heart of ENGAGE is using authentic activities to simulate how citizens conduct inquiries. ENGAGE operates on a major scale. More than 15,000 teachers have signed up across 11 partner countries: UK. Greece, Germany, France, Romania, Israel, Spain, Norway, Switzerland, Lithuania, and Cyprus. \nState of the art innovation \nTeachers need make major changes in practice to use socio-scientific issues in the classroom. Therefore ENGAGE chose a thought-out, multi-pronged approach and created a series of positive conditions for change. We created high-quality lessons that would encourage RRI-based teaching through effective engagement. We also constructed an escalated step pathway of progression in teaching skills load to foster teacher change- In the ENGAGE model, once teachers gain confidence with the intuitive ADOPT teaching approaches, a proportion progress to using more advanced ADAPT materials in the next stage. This second stage involves a deeper interest and commitment to the ENGAGE philosophy, because the materials demand more curriculum time to explicitly teach RRI skills. The third step, called TRANSFORM, is our experiment in project-based learning. It was designed for a small proportion of teachers who wanted to make RRI and socio-scientific issues a major focus of their curriculum enhancement. We provided support to help them plan an issue-based project where students could engage in more autonomous and extended enquiry, and interact with practising scientists. \nUsing an approach to materials that utilise science issues from the news into fully realised and resourced lessons that help teachers use often unfamiliar teaching approaches was based on an already popular model tried and tested resource lead approach lead in the UK. \nThe programme is supported by three key strategies that take a funnel approach to involvement, with more teachers at the ADOPT phase and fewer reaching the TRANSFORM phase, but those that do having a deeper involvement. \n1) The first step, ADOPT, has a very accessible and attractive entry point to achieve take-up on a large scale. \n2) For teachers who were curious to find out why the lessons worked, we developed workshops and online courses to teach the tools for using the materials effectively. \n3) We set up an online community to stimulate reflective dialogue and interaction with more knowledgeable mentors.