Helping Teachers Conceptualize the Radical Reorganization of Their Practice

• In Event: 79.045 - Examining Successes and Challenges From Five Different Science Teacher Professional Development Projects Around the Next Generation Science Standards

Abstract

The challenges to working teachers presented by the NGSS can be summed up as a need to radically re-organize their teaching practice. Over 3 years of working with a group of 25 teachers in an urban school district we have developed a model of professional development organized around 4 pillars of conceptualizing the work of re-organizing teaching in ways aligned with NGSS. These pillars emerged in response to particular learning challenges these teachers faced in working to understand and enact NGSS-aligned instruction. Our conceptualization of them has developed through video recordings of all PD sessions (approx. 180 hours), video recordings of classroom instruction (over 250 hours), and interviews with teachers over the 3 years. Each pillar represents an aspect of teaching practice that must develop to provide equitable access to science learning to all students.
Planning for coherence. Our PD approach focused on working with teachers to revise their own instruction, and we learned that many in the group were not experienced at lesson planning, especially at the level of units. Instead, they tended to rely on scope and sequence as laid out in textbooks. A major focus of PD, then, was developing strategies and tools to help teachers plan for coherent sequences of learning activities from their students’ perspectives. This meant helping teachers select appropriate phenomena to anchor instruction, and supporting their design of unit storylines around phenomena.
Framing clear aims. Beyond designing coherent units, teachers struggled to frame clear, explicit purposes of lessons and instructional activities. This limits students’ opportunities to engage in legitimate practice, as each activity remains framed as an arbitrary school activity. Our strategies for framing clear aims that could engage students were married to coherence strategies, such that teachers considered how the purpose of any instructional activity related to prior and upcoming activities, and built toward explaining phenomena.
Centrality of talk. The importance of talk for productive science learning is well known in the research community, but not among teachers. An obstacle for our teachers was developing confidence that students’ expressions of “wrong” ideas could be productive along the path to canonical understanding. This involved multiple strategies for first eliciting student talk, learning to listen to student ideas, and then putting students in dialogue with each other.
Practices as means to disciplinary ideas. The most difficult obstacle for our teachers was to see students’ engagement in science practices as the means for learning disciplinary ideas. They started with limited understanding of science practice themselves, and they tended to believe students had to know concepts before they could productively investigate, model, or argue. Our PD efforts focused on coaching teachers to provide structured, and repeated, opportunities at practice and to analyze conceptual development through such work.
Our experience has shown that the challenges teachers face in learning to teach to NGSS manifest in relation to learning how to manage these 4 pillars of practice. We hope what we have learned in addressing them will help others involved in science teacher professional development.

Authors

• William A. Sandoval, University of California - Los Angeles

• Jarod N. Kawasaki, University of California - Los Angeles

• Jon Kovach, University of California - Los Angeles

• Leticia Perez, University of California - Los Angeles

• Alexander Kwako, University of California - Los Angeles

• Heather F. Clark, University of California - Los Angeles

• Anahid S. Modrek, University of California - San Diego

• Lynn Kim-John, University of California - Los Angeles