Understanding the Teacher's Role in a Knowledge Community and Inquiry Curriculum

• In Event: 15.015 - The Knowledge Community and Inquiry Model: Synthesizing a Decade's Research for a Widening Audience

Abstract

Objective and Theoretical Framework
Teachers play a critical role in any innovative approach to K12 instruction. The knowledge community approach, in which the classroom is transformed into a community of learners, is no exception to this, challenging teachers to guide student inquiry and collaborations whilst monitoring their understandings. Prior research has not provided much detail about how teachers can create or adopt a knowledge community approach, making the approach inaccessible to most teachers or professional developers.

This study examines the teacher’s role in a knowledge community approach, analysing: 1) the curriculum design, to capture the teacher’s role as it is designed or intended in a knowledge community curriculum; 2) teachers’ prior knowledge and experience, including knowledge of scientific content, as well as technological and pedagogical content knowledge; 3) enactment of the curriculum, in terms of what teachers actually did in their classroom, as contrasted with the designed curriculum; 4) teachers’ interaction with students during the enactment.
Methods and Data Sources
The research site is a mainstream and academically heterogeneous secondary schools (grades 7 – 12) in the city of Toronto. Three ninth grade science teachers and their students (n = 106) from five class sections participated over a twelve-week time period. One teacher was engaged for a two-year period as a design partner. Curriculum design documents, teacher interviews, and video recordings of classroom teaching provided the data sources. Open coding and content analysis techniques are employed in this study.

Results
The curriculum design analysis identifies the following categories of teacher’s role: Content lecturing, evaluating students, introducing learning activities, making connections, explanation or elaboration, and classroom management. The teacher knowledge analysis identifies differences among the teachers in terms of their experience and understanding of the climate change content, inquiry and community learning pedagogy, teacher’s role and the role of technology in teaching, as well as differences between teachers in the coherence of their knowledge. The enactment analysis reveals that all teachers performed more roles than the research team has anticipated in the designed curriculum. While teachers spent a lot of class time dealing with logistical and pedagogical issues, they also spent considerable time in guiding students’ learning activity, setting the learning context, and helping students to elaborate their ideas. Furthermore, teachers with better background knowledge gave more attention to helping students understand and make sense of learning activities.

Significance
The contributions of this study are: 1) a theoretical description of the teacher’s role in a particular pedagogical model called Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI), including specific guideline for teachers teaching with KCI, 2) scientific contribution concerning different forms of teacher knowledge and their interaction with students in classroom practice, 3) a method of teacher-student interaction analysis as well as an application of epistemic network analysis to the measure of the coherence of teachers’ knowledge. This research could also inform teacher professional development relating to the integration of inquiry with technology.

Author

• Naxin Zhao, University of Toronto