Teachers as Knowledge-Building Community: Designing and Enacting Idea-Centric Pedagogy for Young Children

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: Curriculum Leadership in Singapore's Early Childhood Education Landscape: Learning to Lead and Leading to Learn

Abstract

Knowledge Building (KB) focuses on “the production and continual improvement of ideas of value to a community” (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2003; 2006), it embodies the notion that the community accomplishes more than the sum of individuals. KB classroom builds on the child-centric pedagogy by heightening teachers’ attention more specifically on the child’s ideas, what he/she says, thinks, and brings into the class, into the class discussion and inquiry. KB teachers requires teachers to generate opportunistic and inventive procedures derived from principles, in this case, the Knowledge Building principles are adopted (Scardamalia, 2002; Hong et al 2011). KB teachers must continually design and redesign learning and teaching activities, and reformulate classroom procedures, to support idea improvement. This may be fundamental to scientific community but it remained rather alien to the current early-childhood education practice as many practices focus on enacting a pre-determined procedures in class.

This research was set in a school where innovative practice are valued by the school leaders (Collins and Bielacyz, 2006; Zhang et al., 2011, Chen & Hong 2016). The data is presented from an initial 8-week cycle. Each week, eight teachers, along with the principal and two vice principals, met to discuss design, advances and challenges related to KB practice. All teachers are new to the Knowledge Building pedagogy. In these meetings, they shared their classroom enactment and students artefacts and offered solutions to each other’s problems. The meetings served as the means of enculturating teachers into the school-wide Knowledge Building community. Data sources include (a) teachers’ narrative of KB lessons sampled; (b) negotiated understanding of KB in weekly teacher meetings; and (c) teachers’ reflections in one-to-one interviews. The research question is: How do these early-childhood teachers, as a community, construct and explore teaching problems related to Knowledge Building classroom practice?

Analyses of meeting and interview revealed three clear trends in the first cycle of implementing KB: (i) A significant qualitative difference from teachers on their interaction with their children as they shift to focus on their ideas. (ii) A shift from a focus on procedures and formats about a classroom discussion to one in which the teachers started to take a longer view of the challenge as they started to discuss about ways to support idea generation and improvement in a community. This kind of interactions opened up new possibilities for all teachers to advance their practices. (iii) Shift to embrace emergent rather than fixed goals.

Creating new knowledge of practice and innovating classroom practices are essential dimensions of professional development for KB teachers. It is hoped that the analyses of s helps to clarify how the co-construction and reconstruction of teaching problems in a teacher community that facilitates the needed shifts towards idea-centered perspectives.

Authors

• Chew Lee Teo, Singapore National Institute of Education

• Wei Loong David Hung, Nanyang Technological University - National Institute of Education