Eliciting Learner Knowledge: Developing Preservice Teachers' Capacity for Student-Centered Instruction Through Role-Play

• In Event: Playful Practice Spaces: Innovative Approaches for Next Generation Teacher Education

Abstract

Objective
Veteran teachers develop experience predicting and addressing students’ preconceptions; novice teachers lack these skills (Borko & Livingston, 1989). To address this gap, we have developed an activity for pre-service teachers to gain experience gathering students’ understandings called Eliciting Learner Knowledge (ELK). In ELK one participant plays a “teacher”, with the goal of determining the misconceptions of four players playing “students”. The teacher can gather student ideas through discussion, visual examples, or their own ideas. During the debriefing session, the teacher shares what he/she has learned about the students’ ideas, and the students “reveal” their assigned conceptions, and all players discuss the experience. This poster describes what we have learned as we design and refine ELK.

Guiding Frameworks
A basic premise for ELK is that students’ conceptions about the world can be useful building blocks for instruction (Campbell et al, 2016). We use Grossman et al.’s (2009) three key concepts of representation, decomposition, and approximation as a guiding framework. The role play of a classroom discussion with four students represents a classroom. Gathering student knowledge is a decomposition of the complex context of the classroom into a more manageable format for a novice. The participants engage in approximation of the teacher and of fellow students through role play.

Challenges
Assigning personalities to the players created an engaging improvisational format; however, the goal of uncovering student ideas became muddled. Adjusting the online role plays to include more information on students’ ideas and reduce personality information shifted the focus to conceptual understanding. Many of the “teacher” participants engaged in instruction, explaining during the debrief that they were concerned their students would leave class with incorrect ideas. This suggests that the representation of the classroom through the role-play was compelling, and also reinforces the importance of reminding teachers that gathering students’ initial ideas is an important starting point. The online role play captured the transcript of the conversation automatically, allowing for additional focus on student and teacher discourse. The debriefing sessions were also different in person versus online. During the in person role plays, the debriefing discussion became a rich conversation about students’ ideas and conceptions, especially after the students “revealed” their misconceptions to the teachers. The online debriefing sessions focused more on feedback about the software platform than on the game itself.

Insights
We describe the development of a practice space dedicated to gathering students’ understandings, an essential step in developing learner-centered classrooms (Donovan & Bransford, 2005; Furtak & Glasser, 2016). The development process has reinforced the need for clear goals and focused activity in these types of learning experiences, but has also revealed the rich and insightful discussions that are inspired by learners who engage in these activities. We are currently developing a series of related learning experiences that explore how educators can leverage students’ ideas in subsequent instruction.

Authors

• Meredith M Thompson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Dan Roy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology