A four-year design-based research process to iteratively develop, test, and refine a cross-disciplinary instructional framework and professional development model with middle school science teachers, uses their classrooms to examine how these practices support students' data literacy and reasoning skills, and to explore specific areas in which the approach shows greatest promise. The methods used are based on visual thinking strategies and design thinking process. The geospatial datasets used are mostly from NOAA's SOS Explorer and SOS data catalog.