This month we are pleased to feature NSELA's Platinum Partner, Flinn Scientific.

Can you share a specific success story where your organization helped science education leaders overcome a challenge?

We prioritize listening to districts and collaborating on solutions that make science instruction easier for the science supervisor and their teachers to implement and create a more engaging experience for students.

One district approached us after adopting a new core science curriculum that included both publisher materials and district-created lessons. Implementing it consistently across classrooms was a challenge. We partnered closely with the district’s science supervisor to align every unit—both from the publisher and the district’s customized lessons—and developed tailored science kits for each grade level, teacher, and instructional unit.

These kits include all required materials and renewable consumables, allowing schools to easily replenish supplies each year. As a result, teachers now receive ready-to-use materials that align directly with district and state standards, making it significantly easier to implement the curriculum while enabling students to engage in hands-on, creative science learning.

What strategies or resources have been most effective in supporting science education leaders through your programs or services?

Science supervisors are drowning in curriculum decisions but starving for operational support. The most effective thing we do is not sell a product. It is reduce complexity.

When a district adopts a curriculum, teachers face a real gap between what the textbook says to do and what they can pull off given their budget, equipment, and training. We close that gap through kitting aligned to specific curricula, safety resources that build teacher confidence, and a support model that treats lab readiness as part of the instructional ecosystem rather than an afterthought.

How does your organization define and measure the success of science education leadership?

Our field over-indexes on assessment data and under-indexes on whether students are actually doing science, learning, and enjoying it. A strong measure comes down to three things: lab utilization, teacher confidence, and safety culture. Are students in the lab? Do teachers feel equipped to run investigations? Is safety enabling ambitious instruction or giving people a reason to avoid it?

What innovative approaches has your organization taken to empower science education leaders in K-12 settings?

Flinn is working on making our lab procedures open source for teachers. Freely available to every teacher, every district, regardless of whether they buy from us. Frankly, not everyone inside the building loved that decision at first. But we believe access to safe, well-designed lab instructions should not be gated by a purchase order. It has raised the floor for lab quality across the country, and it reflects what we actually believe about our role in the ecosystem. We are not just a supplier. We are a public resource for hands-on science.

How has your partnership with NSELA helped amplify your impact on science education leadership?

NSELA is the professional home for the people who shape science instruction at scale. For Flinn, the partnership keeps us honest. It is easy to build products based on assumptions about what districts need. NSELA gives us direct access to the supervisors who live with those decisions every day, and that feedback loop will continue to shape our services and how we show up as a partner rather than just a supplier. Some of our best ideas have come from NSELA members telling us where we were getting it wrong. That kind of candor is worth its weight in gold.

What advice would you give to district and state science supervisors looking to strengthen science education leadership in their schools?

The most dangerous thing in science education is not a chemical spill. It is a lab that never gets used. Every district we talk to has teachers who want to do more hands-on science but feel unsupported on the operational side. The supervisors making the most progress are building safety infrastructure that says "yes" to ambitious instruction rather than giving teachers reasons to say "no." Invest in making your teachers confident, not just compliant. The measure of great science leadership is not how well you manage risk. It is how much real science your students get to do.