Elementary Teachers’ In-the-Moment Seeing of Children’s Science Thinking

• In Event: Gearing Up: New Technologies for Participant-Collected Data

Abstract

Teaching science involves attending to students’ ideas so that those ideas become the basis for learning in the classroom (CSMTP, 2001). While research indicates this is difficult for teachers (Davis, 2003), in this paper I argue that teachers can and often do pay attention to students’ thinking, but that past theoretical and methodological approaches did not (and practically speaking could not) look at teachers’ in-the-moment thinking while teaching. This in-the-moment thinking is, in fact, essential in understanding what drives activity in science classrooms. More specifically, the work in this paper examines teachers’ epistemological framing of the activity of paying attention to students’ ideas. Epistemological framing is making “sense of what is taking place with respect to knowledge” (Scherr & Hammer, 2009). This sense of what kind of knowledge and behavior is appropriate (Collins & Ferguson, 1993) from moment-to-moment during a science lesson is a key influence on how classroom activity unfolds (Redish, 2004).
To unshroud this moment-to-moment thinking, we deployed a new video technology: three elementary teachers wore small video cameras (POV.1.5) with the capability to capture footage of an event after it occurred. While the cameras recorded continuously, by pressing a button on a remote the teachers signaled the camera save the last minute of recorded video. These teachers each wore the POV cameras attached to a hat on thirteen occasions while teaching and were instructed to “capture students’ ideas.” After each lesson, they reviewed captured moments with a researcher to clarify what they saw as being the student(s) idea and why the moment was captured. Data consist of over 1000 one-minute video clips, each with a corresponding teacher reflection.
One methodological result of this work was learning this technology is usable in classroom research. Not only did teachers learn to use it quickly, they also did not find the instruction to capture students’ ideas to be a strange request. Teachers already had a sense of what students’ science ideas looked like, so they were successful at capturing these moments from the start. One important finding is that early in the year teachers drew on a limited set of epistemological resources when capturing students’ ideas, but that those resources broadened over the course of the year.
A major analytical challenge specific to this technology has been the conflation of teachers’ recordings with teachers’ attention. That is, teacher-recorded moments do not directly map to where their attention was focused in those moments, nor do non-recorded moments (captured by whole-class camera in the classroom) indicate that the teacher was not paying attention. Thus, in interpreting our data we use caution in drawing conclusions about what it tells us about teachers’ attention and thinking.
This work shows that technology can now give us the desired window on teachers' in-the-moment thinking—a realm that has thus far been elusive to research. We are hopeful that teachers, both in-service and pre-service, will soon be able to use this new methodology to capture and reflect on their practice across domains, grades, and other contexts.

Author

• Melissa J. Luna, West Virginia University