Exploring In-Service Teachers' Opportunities to Learn in a Practice-Based Learning Lab

• In Event: 63.085 - MTCC Roundtable Session 26
  In Roundtable Session: 63.085-1 - Investigating Opportunities for Teacher Learning in Online Video-Based Labs

Abstract

Objectives
Opportunities for teachers to learn are most effective when they are practice-based, meaning they are closely connected to the specific content and contexts of teachers’ classrooms (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Darling-Hammond et al., 2009). Further, scholars studying professional learning highlight the importance of learning through both investigations and enactments of practice (Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald, 2009; McDonald, Kazemi, & Kavanagh, 2013). This paper explores teachers’ opportunities to learn (OTLs) given the affordances of varied tasks in the context of an elementary science Learning Lab.

Perspectives
Beyond practice-based pedagogies, we draw on two perspectives:
Situative conceptualization of OTLs (Greeno & Gresalfi, 2008): While OTLs have historically been conceptualized in terms of access to particular information or resources (Pullen & Haertel, 2008), focusing only on what is available underdetermines the learning that may occur. We frame OTLs as living at the intersection of what is available to teachers through Lab tasks and what teachers elevate in their participation.
Emphasis on core teaching practices: We centered the Lab around a set of evidence-based science teaching practices (Authors, 2018), which were embedded in instructional tasks for teachers to try in their classrooms. Core teaching practices can coordinate and contextualize key learnings about the discipline, students as sense-makers, and instructional tools.

Methods
We identified and characterized distinct Lab tasks along several dimensions, including how tasks mapped to a proposed practice-based learning cycle (McDonald et al., 2013), resources provided, etc. We then took a mixed deductive/inductive approach (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) to code teachers’ collective participation in tasks, focusing on what teachers discussed and how they did so.

Data Sources
Data for the study include audiotaped discussions and written responses for Lab tasks across 26 participating K-2 teachers.

Results
Briefly, trends in teachers’ participation suggested five broad categories of OTLs, with distinct foci and ways of interacting: Investigating video representations of teaching practices, Engaging in disciplinary work as adult learners, Digging into artifacts of individual students’ thinking, Co-planning for lessons embedding teaching practices, and Collaboratively reflecting on enactments of teaching practices. In the paper we provide examples of the OTLs and examine how teachers stitched various OTLs together over time.

Significance
This study contributes to the field’s understanding of practice-based teacher learning, with implications for professional learning design.

Authors

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

• Cristina Betancourt, University of Washington

• Soo-Yean Shim, University of Washington - Seattle

• Jessica J. Thompson, University of Washington