Teacher Learning in Practice-Focused Reform Through Co-Design Collaboration

• In Event: Designing for Teacher Learning and Enduring Reform Within Science Education

Abstract

New policies in science education emphasize shifting instruction towards engaging students in the epistemic practices of the sciences. The Framework for K-12 Science Education (NRC, 2012) argues that all students should learn science through the integration of three dimensions: learning core ideas, applying crosscutting concepts through engagement in the scientific practices. Both research and practice communities need to understand how to support teachers to take up, adapt, and implement reform in science teaching. A co-design approach to reform efforts integrates teachers as professional design partners in the design of educational innovations (Penuel, Roschelle, & Shechtman, 2007). The collaborative process attends to reform implementation issues teachers encounter by taking into account the realities of their classroom and everyday life contexts in the design process and the design of the innovation (Penuel, Roschelle, & Shechtman, 2007; Peters & Slotta, 2010).
This paper is focused on the specific dilemmas that arise when teachers introduce new curricular interventions into their instructional practice and local contexts. When teachers choose to participate in a co-design effort and are able to work through dilemmas to create new activity and at the same time evolve the curricular intervention through implementation, we call that “expansive learning,” where teacher, “are involved in constructing and implementing a radically new, wider and more complex object and concept for their activity.” (Engeström & Sannino, 2010, p. 2). In this new activity in which teachers learn, students are also learning more. In this study, seven teachers from five states participated in a curricular co-design effort of a year-long project-based biology curriculum. Dilemmas, acts of transformative agency, and teacher learning were examined within the context of this collaboration. Three types of transformative agency (Engeström, Sannino, & Virkkunen, 2014) were at play and evolved over time: (a) criticizing the current curriculum or professional development, (b) explicating new possibilities for the curriculum or instructional activity, and (c) envisioning new models for the curriculum.
The variations in teachers’ agentic responses to dilemmas arose when teachers in different contexts with different sets of expertise implemented the new intervention. For example, two teachers used the curricular materials in a new configuration (they asked students to use a rubric to evaluate an example from the curricular materials) and thereby envisioned a new model of instructional sequence for the curriculum and shared it with the co-design team during one of the bi-monthly meetings. This act of transformative agency resulted in the addition of this strategy into the curriculum materials for the remainder of the year. This suggestion helped another teacher to decide how much guidance to give students in his first time teaching a project-based curriculum For him, without prior experience in PBL, this dilemma of how much to guide was foregrounded in his instruction throughout the implementation. Through the acts of transformative agency within the bi-weekly co-design meetings, teachers were able to learn from each other as one teacher’s criticizing of the curriculum materials led to other teachers explicating new possibilities as a response to similar dilemmas.

Author

• Katie Van Horne, University of Colorado - Boulder