Exploring Elementary Science Teachers' "Participation With" a Flexible Curricular Mini-Unit

• In Event: 28.071 - Designing for and Engaging With Heterogeneity in Students' Thinking in Science

Abstract

Purposes
In science classrooms, the heterogeneity of students’ ideas, experiences, and questions raises challenges with respect to the design and use of curricula. How can curricula make room for localized meaning-making (Dewey, 1938/1997) while supporting interactions with key conceptual ideas? This poster describes the design of a flexible curricular mini-unit for early elementary science, and explores how teachers worked with the curriculum and students’ contributions to make instructional decisions.

Curricular Design
Briefly, the 4-lesson mini-unit centered on students creating and revising scientific models of why a puddle on the grass disappears over time. We explicitly centered “participation with” the curriculum (Remillard, 2005) via a choose your own adventure component where teachers chose one of multiple possible next steps based on what they noticed in students’ contributions. Drawing on theories of tool mediation (Wertsch, 1991) and educative curricular design (e.g., Davis, Palinscar, Smith, Arias, & Kademian, 2017), educative features included tools for teachers to use to unpack students’ ideas and consider next steps.

Methods and Data
To explore how 47 study teachers worked with the curriculum and students’ contributions in making curricular choices during a 10-week professional development experience, we conducted qualitative analyses of 1) audiorecordings of in-person meetings when teachers interacted with educative features of the curriculum, and 2) online reflective posts where teachers discussed their selection(s). We coded posts for the option selected, whether there was an evident connection to students’ contributions, and varied resources (Cohen, Raudenbush, & Ball, 2003) teachers drew on in their reasoning (e.g., instructional aims, specific noticings about student reasoning, available materials).

Results
We saw high variability in the options teachers selected, and such choices were connected to students’ contributions for all teachers who made their reasoning explicit (70% of teachers). Most interesting was not the individual resources teachers drew on, but how these resources clustered into patterns that seemed to represent different approaches to working with students’ contributions:

Cluster 1. Exploring what students are interested in
• Noticed most popular hypothesis or desired direction among students
• Cited aim of exploring or investigating
• Focused on class-level representations of thinking
Cluster 2. Deepening students’ understandings of key processes
• Noticed common productive idea among students
• Identified ways it could be deepened, at times drawing on expansive content knowledge
• Cited aim of deepening understanding
Cluster 3. Clarifying misunderstandings
• Noticed inaccurate idea from student(s)
• Cited aim of clarifying or correcting
Cluster 4. Pursuing multiple ideas
• Noticed multiple, heterogeneous ideas
• Considered available resources

Finally, with respect to use of educative features, teachers used a “class hypotheses” tool to synthesize and identify distinctions in students’ ideas; we did not observe much use of other features in the professional learning setting.

Significance
This study contributes to a growing set of understandings of how teachers may “participate with” curricula and make responsive choices in science teaching. The identification of multiple approaches teachers used in working with students’ contributions sets the stage for broader study of their prevalence, stability or fluidity, and implications for advancing learning and equity across heterogeneous perspectives.

Authors

• Jennifer Richards, Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy Learning Sciences

• Steve Bonomo, University of Washington

• Jessica J. Thompson, University of Washington

• Christa Haverly, Michigan State University