Opportunities to Learn About Elementary Students as Scientific Sense-Makers Across a Practice-Based Learning Lab

• In Event: Science Sense-Making in Elementary Classrooms: Supporting Teachers to Support Students

Abstract

Purpose
Practice-based teacher learning opportunities, where teachers can investigate and try on evidence-based teaching practices in their own classrooms, hold much promise for supporting meaningful, contextualized learning (e.g., Ball & Cohen, 1999; McDonald, Kazemi, & Kavanagh, 2013). In this paper, we examine teachers’ opportunities to learn (OTLs) about K-2 students as capable scientific sense-makers in relation to a set of science teaching practices (Authors, 2018) and practice-based professional learning tasks in a K-2 Learning Lab on scientific modeling.

Perspective
We conceptualize OTLs from a situative perspective (Gee, 2008; 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 to learners underdetermines the learning that may occur. To understand OTLs in the Lab, we consider the intersection of what is available to teachers as learners through Lab tasks and what teachers elevate in their participation.

Methods
We began by identifying and characterizing distinct Lab tasks in which teachers engaged (see Figure 1). Characteristics included how tasks mapped to a practice-based teacher learning cycle proposed by McDonald et al. (2013), what resources were available to teachers (e.g., tools, videos), what teaching practice was being discussed, and others. We then coded teachers’ collective participation in tasks, attending to what they discussed and how they did so. Analytic codes were developed both deductively and inductively, and drew on facets of teachers’ noticing of student thinking discussed in prior literature (e.g., van Es, 2011). Finally, we looked within and across tasks to describe OTLs.

Data sources
Data for the study include audiotaped discussions and written responses for Lab tasks, as well as written end-of-Lab surveys, for 25 K-2 teachers across multiple cohorts in multiple regions of the United States.

Results
In this paper, we discuss two OTLs about students as capable scientific sense-makers. First, investigating representations of practice — specifically video or work from individual or small groups of students — afforded specific interpretive work with young students’ ideas and means of representation. Second, enactments of practice in their own classrooms and structured reflections thereon functioned as OTLs with two unique affordances: 1) reassessments of young students’ capabilities and 2) deep interconnections among purposes of modeling, student thinking, and instructional practice. Analyses suggest teachers gravitated toward ideas of construction and revision with respect to modeling, and they primarily elevated collaborative and discursive instructional strategies (e.g., gallery walks, questioning), positioning these as ways to build on students’ ideas. Yet interestingly and problematically, while most teachers discussed centering student ideas in end-of-Lab surveys, this did not always carry over to holistic asset-based views of all students themselves.

Significance
This study contributes to the field’s understanding and empirical documentation of practice-based teacher learning and ways in which practice-based opportunities support learning about young students as scientific sense-makers.

Authors

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

• Jessica J. Thompson, University of Washington