Experienced Teachers and High-Leverage Practices: Helping Mentor Teachers Learn to Support Novices in the Learning of High-Leverage Science Teaching

• In Event: 34.047 - Mentoring Matters, but How? Conceptualizing Mentoring Effectiveness From Preservice to In-Service Teaching

Abstract

While the scholarship examining the teaching of high leverage teaching practices to pre-service teachers (Ball & Forzani, 2009; McDonald, et al., 2014; Windschitl et al., 2012) is continuing to grow, fewer teacher educators have been examining how to bring the mentor teachers who work with pre-service teachers into this effort. In teacher education methods courses, teacher educators often engage pre-service teachers in ‘rehearsals’ and ‘micro-teaching’—strategies that work well with novices but that might not fit as easily with more veteran teachers. This paper documents our design-based research to develop a year-long model of professional learning for mentor teachers around high leverage teaching practices. The program is located in a small east-coast MAT program that prepares science teachers for high needs schools in a large urban school district. This paper examines our work to support mentors to: 1) help pre-service teachers learn and enact a focused set of teaching practices in science (for example, using models and representations) 2) develop shared language with the mentee; and 3) deepen their own ability to inquire into, model and enact these high leverage practices in their own classrooms as experienced teachers.
Initial survey data from all 24 mentors in the program, supplemented by interviews with a subset of ten, revealed that mentors sought more help in inquiring into and improving their own teaching in addition to helping our teacher candidates learn (Citation withheld for purposes of Blind Review). For instance, mentors sought specific teaching strategies that drew upon science representations, visualizations and models. Based on this data, we re-shaped our program for mentors to target a set of high-leverage science teaching practices that are simultaneously, the focus of our work with teacher candidates: use of science representations and visualizations; eliciting student ideas; supporting ongoing changes in thinking; and pressing for evidenced based explanation (Kloser, 2014; see also Windschitl, 2012).
First, this paper will articulate key design features from our professional learning program for mentors. For instance, we have selected key program assignments as a context for the work with mentors, assignments that we have designed to require our candidates to use high leverage teaching practices. Rather than ask experienced teachers to engage in rehearsals of a practice, we are engaging mentors in rehearsing and planning specific feedback for mentees regarding using representations and models, eliciting student ideas, pressing for evidence-based explanation—which also helps the teachers be more explicit about the practices themselves. Next, this paper shares evidence of mentors’ shifts in mentoring over the course of the year, drawing from mentor’s culminating inquiries and their own reflections on their work with mentees. We share data regarding how mentors used specific program assignments as a context for elaborating the kind of productive feedback they can give mentees, as well as to deepen their own teaching strategies in these arenas. We will end with some of the challenges and next steps in this design-based research on high leverage teaching practices with mentor teachers.

Authors

• Karen M. Hammerness, American Museum of Natural History

• Elaine Howes, American Museum of Natural History

• Ro Kinzler, American Museum of Natural History

• Maritza B. Macdonald, American Museum of Natural History

• Cristina Trowbridge, American Museum of Natural History