Noticing Students' Science Ideas to Improve Teaching

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

Abstract

This project describes how science teacher candidates noticed their students’ science thinking to inform changes in instruction. Eleven pre-service science teachers (PSSTs) participated in a methods course during the final semester of their credential program. The PSSTs completed three rounds of a lesson analysis cycle that involved collaboratively planning, enacting, recording, analyzing, and reflecting on a lesson. Of interest in this study is what PSSTs noticed in their lesson, how these noticings were interpreted, and what instructional adjustments were proposed in response (van Es & Sherin, 2002).
Prior to each round of lesson analysis, PSSTs analyzed classroom video examples of different phases of Ambitious Science Teaching (Windschitl, Thompson, Braaten, & Stroupe, 2019). For each phase, attention was drawn to what students were saying and doing and what that might mean about their science understanding. During the following lesson analysis cycles, PSSTs were prompted to select one or two principles of Ambitious Science Teaching as a focus and to identify evidence of achieving the goal/s from the student work or video. They individually viewed and annotated their lesson video then used graphic organizer to link their annotations with lesson goals and instructional moves.
Study data include the lesson videos, annotations recorded on the graphic organizers, and written reflections from the three cycles. PSSTs’ annotations and reflections were coded using an inductive approach (Hatch, 2002). I noted preliminary codes for each annotation in the videos and graphic organizers and each idea unit in the written reflections. I combined and refined these preliminary codes and then used them to code the entire corpus. Final codes that emerged included attention to student ideas, student behavior, teacher behavior, relations between teacher actions and students, and other issues such as fieldwork constraints and issues with video. Using these codes, an analytic memo was written to characterize how each PSST approached each lesson cycle and to characterize the themes that emerged across the three cycles of analysis for all PSSTs (Miles & Huberman, 1994).
The PSSTs adopted a student-centered lens when analyzing their instruction, both in how PSSTs identified moments that showed how students grappled with the science ideas and how the PSSTs measured lesson effectiveness in terms of the access it provided to student thinking. This affirms what a growing number of studies have found -- that with support, novice teachers can attend to students and their thinking rather than more superficial aspects of classroom interactions. What is noteworthy is that these novices evaluated instruction not in terms of student participation, but in terms of how much access it afforded the teacher to students’ evolving ideas which then informed their next instructional move. Responding to student thinking is a difficult skill (Author, 2015) so it is encouraging to see early in practice. The repeated and tightly framed focus on ambitious teaching and student thinking to inform instruction in this study can inform professional development design for pre-service and early-service teachers.

Author

• Tara Barnhart, Chapman University