The Influence of an International Professional Development Program for the Design of Engaging Secondary Science Teaching in Finland

• In Event: 14.037 - Building International Professional Learning Communities

Abstract

Science education research (Zeyer et al., 2013), policy, and curriculum papers (NRC, 2012; FMEC, 2013; EU, 2016) emphasize that school science should better represent real scientific practices in order to engage students in learning. According to the flow theory (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), a student will engage in a task if he/she simultaneously experiences elevated feelings of challenge, skill, and interest.
This study is part of the collaboration between researchers and secondary teachers in Finland and the U.S, through which we have designed a two year professional development programme (PDP) consisting of two cycles of teaching modules, emphasizing scientific practices and project-based learning (PBL). PBL aims to support students to learn disciplinary content through engaging scientific practices, like questioning, observing, classifying, predicting, measuring and analyzing (Krajick & Merritt, 2012). We focus here on two questions:
1. How did the designed teaching modules support students’ engagement in learning?
2. What was the Finnish teachers’ experience with the international PDP?
Several researchers argue that PDP should be teacher-led, continuous (long-term), situated or connected to the classroom context, collaborative, and include reflective practices (Loughran, 2002; Oliveira, 2010; Avalos, 2011; van den Bergh, Ros, & Beijaard, 2015). Specifically, individual and collaborative reflection regarding beliefs and/or experiences have been regarded as essential for the PDP (Mansvelder-Longayroux, Beijaard, & Verloop, 2007). The PDP was designed according to previous guidelines and it consisted of eight international workshops during a two year period, several teachers co-planning sessions, and researchers’ visits to the school and participation to the planning as described in Table 1.
The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) was used for measuring students’ level of engagement randomly in various science-learning situations using the smartphone application as described in Table 2 (Csikszentmihalyi & Schneider, 2000). Students’ situational interest, skills, and challenges were measured by Likert scale items. Moreover, the students selected the science practice and indicated if they were collaborating. The teachers evaluated the support of the PDP through 5 point Likert scale questions and an open question.
Table 3 describes the percentage of students who have been engaged during both cycles of the PDP. Table 4 presents the evaluations of the PDP (support to the design of the teaching modules) by Finnish teachers. In the answers to the open questions, the teachers talked positively about their professional development, especially their competence to organize PBL and scientific practices and these support to students’ engagement.
The teachers, together with researchers, have been successful in planning engaging teaching modules which emphasize scientific practices in the context of PBL. Collaboration as such is not alone enough engaging.
Teachers have had progress in the renewal of their science teaching. The teachers emphasized this topic in their open answers and described how the PDP supported them to organize project-based learning and scientific practices in a way supportive to students’ engagement. Teachers evaluated that collaboration and planning of teaching modules with teachers and researchers and co-reflection were most supportive to their PD (Sowder, 2007; Falk & Drayton, 2009; Linn, 2009; Yoon & Kim, 2010).

Author

• Jari Lavonen, University of Helsinki