A Responsive Approach to Supporting Preservice Physics Teachers in Enacting Responsive Teaching

• In Event: 54.044 - Exploring Varied Approaches to Supporting Responsive Teaching in Science and Mathematics

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this poster is to describe a responsive approach to supporting pre-service physics teachers in considering and enacting responsive instructional practices. This approach differs from other teacher education initiatives within responsive teaching (RT), many of which advance a particular stance on what teachers need to know to enact this type of instruction [e.g., teachers need to experience the pursuit of science themselves, so that they can support this pursuit among their students (Maskiewicz, 2016)].

Perspective
We show how and why one university pedagogy course was designed to invite and then take up pre-service teachers’ concerns and questions about RT. In particular, we articulate some of the pedagogy course instructor’s (also the first author) original motivation for designing a responsive pedagogy course centered on RT; these motivations overlap with many of the articulated affordances of responsive teaching in science and mathematics: promoting novice teacher agency (Sikorski, 2016), supporting teachers in refining their own ideas about teaching (Author, 1997; Atkins & Frank, 2016; Ball, 1993), and seeking to open up multiple and diverse entry points into the conversation about RT (Authors, 2001). We use the theoretical lens of sense-making (Weick, 1995) to unpack the central questions that one cohort of pre-service teachers asked about RT as they explored this instructional approach.

Data Sources/Methods
The data for this study comes from one cohort of novice teachers over two quarters of a university pedagogy course. Drawing on qualitative methods for studying teaching (Erickson, 1986) and characteristics of sense-making (Allen & Penuel, 2015; Weick, 1995), we analyzed course assignments and artifacts for evidence of novice teacher sense-making about responsive teaching and how they enacted RT in their instructional placements.

Results
Much of the cohort’s sense-making about RT took the form of questions that they asked and iterated on over time. In particular, novice teachers regularly wondered whether RT is okay, whether they were capable of enacting it, what counts as a “seed of science,” and how they could build on the “seeds of science” in their own students’ discourse. We show that these questions – and novice teachers’ answers to them – evolved over time, and we argue that their rich, collaborative sense-making is one affordance of a responsive approach to RT education. Furthermore, we give evidence from course assignments that these teachers enacted and valued RT in parallel with their sense-making.

Significance
Our case study highlights the central tensions that teachers may experience as they enter this instructional space and what “resolution” of such tensions can look like, and it illustrates some of the affordances of a responsive approach to supporting teachers in becoming more responsive (e.g., rich sense-making about RT).

Authors

• Amy Robertson, Seattle Pacific University

• Jennifer Richards, University of Washington