How Teachers Negotiate Uncertainty for Science, Students, and Teaching

• In Event: 69.019 - Examining Uncertainty as a Construct for Promoting Meaningful Scientific Engagement

Abstract

Our work is informed by accounts that frame science as an uncertain and social activity (Ford, 2008; Pickering, 1995). From this perspective, disciplinary practices are developed in scientific communities to manage uncertainty and allow scientists to agree on shared accounts of how the world works. Several science educators have argued that for students to take up scientific practices in meaningful ways, they have to experience some of this uncertainty and develop practices to respond to it (Ford, 2005; Lehrer & Schauble, 2012; Metz, 2008). However, few studies have examined how teachers make sense of uncertainty and what shifts they have to make as they begin to enact it.

This study focused on a year-long professional development (PD) program conducted with seven second grade teachers in a relatively well-resourced mid-sized district. The purpose was to understand how to help elementary teachers “open up” their curriculum, which (like many elementary curricula) was scripted and provided little room for students to make decisions about how to conduct investigations, experience surprises, or engage in argumentation. The PD engaged teachers in conducting science investigations with uncertainty built into them, discussing tools for using uncertainty to support students’ participation in scientific practices, planning adaptions to curriculum, and reviewing video of the group’s implementation of adaptations.

Data collected were video records, field notes, and artifacts from the four professional development sessions, classroom enactment video, and pre- and post-interviews with teachers. Analysis was guided by situative accounts of teachers’ learning (Horn, 2005) and focused on how teachers made sense of uncertainty and incorporated it in their work with students. We coded and discerned themes across 123 transcribed episodes of teachers’ pedagogical reasoning (EPR’s; Horn, 2005) from the PD in which teachers discussed uncertainty in science, for teaching, or for students. We used interview transcripts to make sense of individuals’ thinking before and after the PD.

In this paper, we unpack the ideas teachers brought to PD and the ways their ideas shifted. Initially, teachers sought to open up curriculum in order to increase student choice, and, therefore, increase engagement and opportunity to develop “critical thinking skills,” a vision that posed both resources and challenges for our work together. Key shifts in teachers’ thinking included: (1) shifting goals for students’ engagement in science, (2) beginning students’ work with a complex phenomenon planned to include several connections to important content understandings and (3) seeing variability in students’ strategies for collecting and analyzing data as a resource for debate and learning. Finally, we note two enduring challenges teachers faced and that we would need to address in future iterations of this work: (1) deciding what to do with students’ diverse ideas during conversation and (2) understanding uncertainty as an asset for addressing content goals as well as scientific practices. We discuss the importance of helping teachers develop strategies that allow students to experience uncertainty without unduly increasing their own uncertainty about learning goals and instructional paths.

Authors

• Eve Manz, Boston University

• Enrique Henry Suarez, University of Colorado - Boulder