Colearning Core Science Teaching Practices

• In Event: Tools and Routines for Preparing STEM Teachers

Abstract

Purpose: Novice science teachers need support in learning and adopting high-leverage teaching practices. In our work we define a core set of high-leverage discursive practices that broadly support novices in learning to: 1) identify scientifically important explanations and 2) work with students’ ideas. This paper focuses on the ongoing learning of these practices during internship. Research shows that even when mentor teachers allow their interns to try out core practices, they often lack tools or frameworks to provide feedback to improve the novices’ performance.

Theoretical Framework: This study draws together multiple bodies of literature: 1) teacher and student learning around high-leverage science teaching practices (Lampert & Graziani, 2009; Windschitl, Thompson, Braaten & Stroupe, under review), 2) novice teacher learning and the role of tools and routines in supporting learning (Thompson, Windschitl, & Braaten, under review), 3) teacher learning in communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) and in cultural, historical activity systems (Roth & Tobin, 2004) and 4) novice-expert teacher apprenticeship models (Feinman-Nemser, 2001).

Methods: This intervention study involved eight mentor teachers and their interns. Mentor teachers attended a summer institute in 2010 and participated in meetings and social media discussions throughout the academic year. The aim was to support mentors in: 1) aligning visions of science teaching practices, 2) developing tools for mentoring, and 3) developing advanced sets of core high-leverage practices.

Data sources: Each mentor-intern pair was observed co-teaching 5 times between September 2010 and March 2011. We also observed and participated in 4 planning and 4 debriefing sessions and did pre and post interviews. We examined the degree to which mentors and interns used core practices, what they attended to in planning and debriefing, how pairs used tools and routines, and how mentors framed their apprenticeship role. We compared observation and interview data to 11 mentor-intern pairs who did not participate in the interventions.

Results: Not all mentor-intern pairs oriented around core practices, some interns entered student teaching with overly-simplified notions of the practices and some mentors experimented with some but not all of the practices. Interns who adopted the most ambitious practices (as measured by the level of student rigor in classroom discussions) had mentors who routinely attempted the practices themselves and who stayed involved in planning throughout the internship, without ever fully “turning over responsibility.” Using planning tools they created, they refocused interns when they regressed toward less ambitious practices. Importantly, these mentors did not act independently. They used social media to develop a community of practice that constantly inquired and challenged the core practices and the ways in the practices supported student learning. More than just being advocates for the core practices the mentors engaged in re-defining the activity of mentoring as collective endeavor.

Scholarly significance: There is little research on how mentors and interns productively interact around the intensive intellectual and professional problems of classroom teaching. This study contributes to a knowledge base of novice-mentor teacher learning and describes critical relationships among tool use, creating curricular visions, and buffering against oppositional contextual factors.

Authors

• Jessica J. Thompson, University of Washington

• Sara Hagenah, University of Washington