Teaching the Practice of Leading Science Sense-Making Discussions

• In Event: Core Practices in Teacher Education: Preparing Teachers to Facilitate Whole-Class Discussion

Abstract

In science education, the consortium has focused its efforts at Program A, a residency program in an urban center; Program B, a masters-level alternative certification program at a private university; and Program C, a masters-level traditional certification program at a large public university. The three science methods courses are all focused at the secondary level, with candidates working toward middle school or high school teaching certification in a range of science disciplines. The science education sub-group further specified the core practice of facilitating discussion by focusing on discussions that entail making sense of scientific phenomena, for example through analyzing and interpreting data. The initial science education specification of this practice entailed four main elements: framing the discussion, publicly representing data and/or student ideas, facilitating the discussion, and closing the discussion. The three teacher educators each used the teacher education pedagogies of modeling and rehearsal to work with the teacher candidates on the practice.

In brief, we found that Teacher Educator A mainly relied on the teacher education pedagogy of rehearsal, making less use of modeling. Teacher Educator A's rehearsals were typically highly authentic (because candidates rehearsed lessons they planned to teach the next day). This yielded a high degree of variation in the rehearsals as well as in the focus of the feedback the teacher educator provided. Teacher Educator B used both modeling and rehearsal in teaching discussion. His modeling veered away from his plan for multiple reasons; in the second day of modeling, he was able to steer back to ensure that the modeling highlighted what he intended to highlight about discussion. In the rehearsals, Teacher Educator B provided a set of data for candidates to use as the basis for their discussions. Each candidate planned a discussion around data related to climate change, and rehearsed their data discussions with a group of peers and an experienced teacher educator. These rehearsals were less authentic and less variable than those in Teacher Educator A's class. Teacher Educator C also used both modeling and rehearsal. Like Teacher Educator B, modeling took longer than anticipated as he stepped out of his role as a “secondary science teacher” frequently to make his thinking explicit. For rehearsals, Teacher Educator C's candidates planned around a science topic they had selected earlier to be the basis all of their rehearsals for the term; they planned for these rehearsals with peers who had selected the same topic. In Teacher Educator C's specification of the practice, emphasis was put on (a) the importance of students' opportunities for sensemaking and participation in collective discourse and (b) setting a clear goal for the discussion; these served as threads running through the specification.

Across these sites, we identified three main factors that shaped each teacher educator's use of the pedagogies to teach the practice: the program or institutional context, each teacher educator's history, and the constitution of the members of the class. In the full paper, we will explore the implications of these factors for engaging in practice-based teacher education.

Authors

• Elizabeth A. Davis, University of Michigan

• Matthew J. Kloser, University of Notre Dame

• Andrea Wells, Boston Teacher Residency

• Mark A. Windschitl, University of Washington

• Janet Carlson, Stanford University