A Trajectory of Change: How a Teacher Supports Text-Based Explanatory Modeling in a High School Biology Classroom

• In Event: Teachers Learning to Support Student Agency in Classroom Discourse: Case Studies in Mathematics, Literature, and Science

Abstract

This presentation traces shifts in a teacher (Ms. S) and her students’ discursive practices throughout her participation in professional learning sessions that aimed to support text-based modeling in high school biology classrooms. Ms. S participated in ~90 hours of professional learning sessions over the course of 11 PD sessions (over 9 months), as part of a larger project. The project’s overall goal was to engage adolescent students in evidence-based argumentation using information in multiple texts to build explanatory models (see Authors, 2016). As such, the PD sessions were designed to promote shifts in 4 dimensions science instruction:
(1) Establish a classroom culture to support text-based inquiry,
(2) Shift teachers’ and students’ participation structures to support text-based modeling,
(3) Use metacognitive (MC) inquiry to deepen reading and sensemaking practices, and
(4) Engage in reading as scientific practice, with a focus on text-based modeling

To bring about shifts in these 4 dimensions, the PD sessions were designed to attend to how teachers learn and the contexts in which they apply and reflect on that learning. Over the course of 11 PD sessions, we engaged teachers in 7 different kinds of learning experiences: (1) inquiry into reading processes, (2) analysis of classroom video cases, (3) inquiry enactments of model lessons, (4) professional readings and discussions about reading processes, (5) formative assessment of student work, (6) reflections on teaching practice, and (7) planning for the implementation of text-based modeling in their own classrooms. Educative curriculum modules (Davis & Krajcik, 2005) were used throughout the PD; teachers used the modules as learners and then adapted them for use in their own classrooms (see Authors, 2013). The project concluded with a RCT which indicated that the PD led to overall improvements in student’s ability to engage in text-based modeling (Authors, 2019).

This presentation examines how participation in the Project X PD led to these shifts by focusing on the trajectory of change in Ms. S’s classroom with respect to the four different dimensions of change that were targeted by the PD. As Ms. S enacted strategies learned in the PD in her classroom, observations indicated shifts in patterns of teacher and student talk. These shifts in T-S talk were documented by using the AARTS coding scheme to code excerpts of whole group discourse over the duration of Ms. S’s participation in the project’s PD. Excerpts were sampled early in the PD (after 4 sessions of PD) and at the end (after 11 sessions) of the PD. Overall, we found that while students moved toward the upper levels of the agency continua, the discursive interactions remained highly scaffolded and managed by the teacher. We end the session by discussing how scope and substance of the PD may have influenced the kinds of shifts we saw in Ms. S’s classroom. We speculate that the opportunities to learn afforded by teachers reflections on their own classroom enactments are crucial for teachers to effect shifts in the four dimensions and make progress along the agency continua.

Authors

• Mon-Lin Ko, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Susan R. Goldman, University of Illinois at Chicago