Attending to the Substance of Ideas in Doing and Teaching Science

• In Event: 54.044 - Exploring Varied Approaches to Supporting Responsive Teaching in Science and Mathematics

Abstract

As educators seek ways to engage students in the practices of science (NRC, 2012), the need for professional development (PD) that engages teachers in “doing science” becomes pressing (Moon, et al, 2012; Salter & Atkins, 2013; van Zee & Roberts, 2001). This need motivated the design of our blended-online three-course PD for science teachers. Our goal was to provide teachers opportunities to experience science as a pursuit, “a refinement of everyday thinking” (Einstein, 1936), where they build on their ideas to construct new understandings of phenomena. While the first course was mostly about teachers’ own scientific inquiry, the second course also had teachers study examples of student inquiry, and the third focused primarily on teachers’ analysis of their classroom videos which they collected regularly throughout the PD.

Here, we first report on how teachers engaged in doing science in Course 1, showing evidence of their progress and increasing stability in sense-making less than halfway through the course. We then present analysis of teachers’ classroom videos (Derry et al., 2010), showing progress in their responsiveness to student thinking, specifically in how they took up and pursued students’ ideas starting around the end of Course 2. As such, these results indicate a shift both in teachers’ doing science, and later, in their instructional practice.

Second, to understand how the dynamics of doing science might relate to their responsiveness in the classroom, we examine a case study of a teacher Dione, focusing on one instance of her participation in science with her peers in Course 1, and another instance from her teaching science in Course 3. The analysis, we argue, provides support for three claims:
1. Dione’s participation in both contexts required her to engage in the intellectual work of eliciting, interpreting, and responding to someone else’s thinking;
2. The intellectual demand on Dione to understand her peer’s idea in science was continuous with the intellectual demand needed to make sense of her student’s idea;
3. However, these demands were nested under considerably different goals which shaped Dione’s roles within and framing of these moments (Goffman, 1974; van De Sande & Greeno, 2012): while in PD Dione’s focus was on her own sense-making about the science, in her teaching, she had the challenge to pursue and make sense of her student’s idea, an idea in tension with her own understanding.

In sum, this study suggests that engaging teachers in scientific inquiry can facilitate the enactment of responsive teaching in the ways it promotes attention and attunement to ideas. However, it might not be sufficient: While both acts require an epistemic orientation to ideas that involves attention, care, investment, and curiosity, that orientation serves distinct purposes, namely (1) the pursuit of coherent, explanatory accounts of phenomena in science; and (2) the pursuit and exploration of students’ thinking in teaching.

This research contributes to the literature by drawing attention to the relationship between teachers’ doing science and teaching science responsively, foregrounding the importance of attunement to ideas as part of teachers’ growth as responsive practitioners.

Authors

• Lama Ziad Jaber, Florida State University

• Vesal Dini, Tufts University

• David Hammer, Tufts University

• Ethan Danahy, Tufts University