Supporting Teacher Practices in Promoting Discourse With a Teleological Approach to Professional Development

• In Event: 45.046 - Teacher Learning to Position Students as Capable in Class Discussions: Looking Across Subject Matter Domains

Abstract

Problem. When learners participate in discourse in classrooms, they build on their experiences and community, culturally-based and linguistic resources to make sense of the phenomenon (Authors, in press). Teachers support this by leveraging the ideas with a sensemaking stance (Warren, et al. 2001), capitalizing on the affordances of the idea for collaborative sensemaking.

This emphasis on collaborative sensemaking is the basis of much science education research, curriculum, and teaching practice. But, in PD, we often ignore this model for learning through discourse that would describe a dialogic relationship between researchers and teachers (Sandoval, 2014). Instead, we leave the expertise of teaching science to the presenters, thereby diminishing opportunities for teacher sensemaking. This reliance on a transmission approach to teacher learning of high leverage discourse practices creates a specific “body of knowledge”, (Kelly, 2006) rather than enacted knowledge the teachers own.

In this poster, we ask: How can we approach PD teleologically (Biesta, 2015), enhancing the alignment of our PD design with our theoretical model of learning? And, how can we engage teachers in agentively and critically figuring out discourse practices (Cochran-Smith, 2009) that support equitable sensemaking and communities?
Grounding Framework. Our PD is designed to: solicit and build on pluralistic understandings of what it means to know (Eisner, 2002); strengthen teacher sensemaking of practice; and open space for agentively “trying on” roles as questioner of practice and purposeful crafter of community. We do this by creating opportunities for teachers and researchers to collaboratively:
1. Engage in discourse to figure out high leverage participatory practices that support equitable sensemaking communities and socio-critical awareness, (Mensah, 2016).
2. Examine and critique elements of the dialogue opportunities that promote student sensemaking about natural phenomenon, and further action (Van Lier, 2007).
3. Develop an evidence-based repertoire of high level practices and accompanying rubric.

Methods and Data. In our elementary science units, and in our PD for those units, we use discourse tools (Authors, 2016) that highlight potential avenues for use of learner ideas through assessing and then leveraging for shared sensemaking (Damşa et al, 2010). The tools serve to accentuate the repertoire of practices that are available to classroom communities who seek to use all offered ideas for shared sensemaking.

For this study, we video-taped and transcribed three teachers’ reflection interviews before and after the PD session. Our analysis focuses on how they discuss the plurality of learner ideas – both their own in the PD session and their students’ in the classroom.

Findings. Preliminary analysis suggests that: 1. teachers employ and build on diverse intellectual resources to make sense of particular discourse practices (e.g., pressing for reasoning) and 2., that the focus on sensemaking – not acquisition-- opens spaces for discourse practices to become the locus of shared innovation during planning for and reflection on teaching.

Significance. The field benefits from design principles for PD that build on and value lived experience of teachers and the mutually evolving process of construction of identity (Holland, Fox & Daro, 2008).) as expert through sensemaking discourse (Biesta, 2010).

Authors

• Emily Adah Miller, University of Georgia

• Leema G. Berland, University of Wisconsin - Madison