Supporting Elementary Teachers to Adapt Curriculum Materials for Increased Uncertainty

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

Abstract

As the practices emphasized in NGSS are implemented in classrooms, one pressing question is how best to support teachers to engage students in these practices as meaningful approximations of scientific activity, rather than presenting them as rote structures and skills. Doing so may present particular challenges in elementary classrooms. First, science instruction is usually driven by textbooks or kits that specify both scientific explanations and the activities that students should engage in. Second, elementary teachers tend to be less confident in both their understanding of scientific practices and pedagogy for teaching science. Therefore, elementary students’ participation in science is often highly structured, with little room for alternative explanations, disagreement, and multiple iterations of experiments, removing many of the features of the activity system within which scientists conduct these practices, and the reasons that they are meaningful in scientific activity (Manz, 2014).
In this paper, I report on a pilot effort conducted in a district that is considering adopting NGSS. The pilot project was conducted with the district science coordinator, six elementary teachers, and one pre-service teacher in a relatively well-resourced, mid-sized school district. Over the course of one school year, teachers participated in four sessions, each lasting 4-7 hours. The purpose of this research was twofold: first, to understand that challenges that the district might face in implementing the eight NGSS practices into elementary school classrooms; and second, to work with a small group of teachers on curriculum adaptation and redesign with the aim of engaging students in more meaningful approximations of the NGSS practices. Two conjectures drove the design of the sessions conducted with teachers: (1) When teachers learn to open up their curriculum to uncertainty and variation in student thinking, they can seed approximations of scientific practices as listed in NGSS; and (2) Teachers need support to know what to do with uncertainty and variability in student thinking.
To explore our conjectures, we engaged teachers in the following forms of activity. First, in each session, they participated in science explorations that were characterized by uncertainty and debriefed what practices they engaged in and why those practices were useful to them. Second, they explored teaching structures and tools designed to help teachers engage students in uncertain activity and support productive discussion (e.g., Michaels and O’Connor’s talk moves). In addition, the teachers worked with each other to consider how to adapt curriculum materials based on discussions and then tried out those changes in their classroom. Finally, they watched video of participants trying out these changes and analyzed both students’ participation in practices and teaching strategies that supported those practices. In the poster, I will present the design of the project and discuss initial findings regarding how teachers conceptualized the practices and their relationship to the forms of uncertainty that they introduced into the classroom.

Author

• Eve Manz, Boston University