We are currently reworking the I-Club website. Please enter your contact information, or visit us again soon!
Welcome to the Investigators Club Official Website. Join us as we tackle some of the planet's most perplexing phenonmena. This site provides you with a starting point to begin your investigations: experiments, videos, lesson plans, and more are all here for you to explore, use, and learn from. Investigate it all.
The Investigators Club is a research-tested approach to teaching and learning science — in particular conceptual physics, Pre-K through 8th grade. Based on research in the cognitive sciences as well as socio-cultural psychology, the principles and practices of the Investigators Club have been thoroughly field-tested over the past 10 years in a variety of settings (from Pre-K through 8th grades, as well as adult learning/teacher training seminars). Supported by a number of national, federal, and state grants, the Investigators Club (the “I-Club”) embodies the emerging national and international consensus about the nature of effective science teaching and learning.
•Science is a practice, not an accumulation or mastery of texts.
•The Investigators Club builds on students' already- existing, highly-developed embodied knowledge of the world.
•In the I-Club, children and teachers learn science - by doing science (participating in authentic practices).
•The I-Club emphasises a facilitated process of group discussion, combining "Accountable Talk" and "collaborative learning"- thinking with others to generate and weigh evidence, develop predications, explanations, and theories, using models and representations linked to evidence in the world.
•The I-Club centers on conceptual physics as the foundation for chemistry and biology.
•The I-Club provides a comprehensively designed and sequenced set of tasks which allows teachers who are not themselves experts to become learners of science and effective teachers of science.
•The I-Club tasks are organized into “learning progressions” - developing core scientific concepts (or “big ideas”) over years, not weeks or months, in coherent units, from Pre-K through 8th grade.