Noticing Everyday Language and Familiar Experiences as Sense-Making Resources

• In Event: Conceptualizing Teacher Noticing in Research on Teaching and Teacher Learning

Abstract

Objectives
In response to a new vision of science that challenges students to make sense of complex real-world phenomena (NRC, 2012; NGSS Lead States, 2013), teacher educators need to support preservice teachers (PSTs) to develop a professional vision of ambitious teaching that positions students as epistemic agents in the classroom. We utilize Ambitious Science Teaching (Windschitl et al., 2018) to help PSTs notice and leverage students’ social, linguistic, and cultural sense-making repertoires (Bang et al., 2017) as resources that support individual and collective scientific sense-making. This study examines how tool-supported video club (Authors, 2019) supports PSTs in noticing and attending to equitable sense-making.
Theoretical Framework
Our research adopts a situative perspective (Greeno, 2006) to theorize teacher noticing in the context of practice and to understand how teachers’ noticing develops in a video club context (Sherin & van Es, 2009). Through video clubs, PSTs shift their professional gaze from a teacher-centered frame to focusing on student thinking (Barnhart & van Es, 2015; Luna & Sherin, 2017). Video clubs serve as a mechanism and context for engaging PSTs in noticing and attending to students’ resources for sense-making.
Methods
This qualitative study explores how six secondary science PSTs noticed and attended to students’ sense-making in video club. Data included annotated video clips of PSTs’ instruction, video club discussions, and written video analyses. The authors engaged in inductive coding (Corbin & Strauss, 2014) and thematic analysis (Guest et al., 2012) informed by Haverly et al.’s (2018) model of sense-making moments.
Results
PSTs noticed students drawing on epistemic resources to make sense of science ideas, particularly everyday language use and references to familiar experiences. During video club, PSTs focused their discussion of these moments in two distinct ways. PSTs used students’ use of everyday language and familiar experiences as levers to engage in their own scientific sense-making. When a middle school student drew on his experience that “playdough tastes salty” when sense-making about whether playdough would conduct electricity, PSTs referenced their personal experiences of making playdough to understand both the student’s idea and the science:
PST 1: It does have salt because it's, I mean it's a dough, so it has salt but I wonder why...maybe it's like, because it has water in it?
PST 2: Maybe.
PST 3: But what does the salt have to do - is salt generally a good conductor?
PSTs used students’ resources as levers for exploring how to “make space” for student sense-making (Haverly et al., 2018). One PST felt like she was only hearing from a few students. Another PST suggested a participant structure encouraging student crosstalk: “You can have one person per group travel around and switch after a few minutes to discuss their ideas to be able to explain to not only you, but their classmates as well.”
Scholarly Significance
This study contributes insight into how video club contexts situated within a teacher preparation program focused on ambitious teaching supports PSTs in noticing students’ everyday language use and lived experiences as assets to support equitable sense-making.

Authors

• Heather Jo Johnson, Vanderbilt University

• Kirsten K. N. Mawyer, University of Hawaii - Manoa