Article

“Making Space”: How Novice Teachers Create Opportunities for Equitable Sense-Making in Elementary Science

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Abstract

Scholarly calls to reform science education for all students emphasize scientific sense-making. Despite the importance of sense-making, few strategies exist to help novice teachers learn to notice and respond equitably to students’ scientific sense-making in elementary science. In this article, we report on a qualitative case study in which we investigated sense-making moments that occurred when novice teachers facilitated classroom discussions. Findings suggest that when novice teachers made space in class discussions for sense-making—for example, by trying different responses to clarify student ideas or waiting before responding to figure out next steps—this expanded opportunities for shared epistemic authority; however, novices did not often recognize these moments as productive for sense-making. Findings also suggest that novice teachers may benefit from support to help them develop their abilities to notice, interpret, and respond equitably to students’ scientific sense-making in class discussions.

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... These interactions are complex because teachers perceive and interpret students' epistemic actions in idiosyncratic ways. Teachers respond to students' epistemic contributions in varied ways, ranging from responsively leveraging students' ideas for science learning when they view the ideas as valuable, to dismissing students' epistemic contributions when they view the ideas as tangential to science curriculum learning goals (e.g., Engle & Conant, 2002;Haverly et al., 2020;Manz & Suárez, 2018). ...
... These include problematizing the subject matter (e.g., encouraging students' questions and proposals to explore more critically), giving students' authority to address the problem (e.g., elevating students' ideas in collective knowledge building), holding students' accountable to disciplinary norms (e.g., justify their reasoning, take ownership of their learning process), and providing students with relevant resources that empower them to explore and experiment autonomously (Engle & Conant, 2002;O'Connor & Michaels, 2019). Recently, Haverly et al. (2020) demonstrated that the ways in which teachers notice (i.e., recognize and attend to) students' agentic contributions directly influence the real-time pedagogical decisions they make in service of or against equitable student sense-making. For example, when a student stated a scientifically incongruent idea that the moon has less gravity because there is no atmosphere pushing down on it, rather than immediately correcting their emergent ideas, the teacher treated the student's idea as a public resource to being considered and challenged by peers that in turn, created space for students to collectively drive a deeper understanding of the relationship between a person's weight and the gravity on the moon (Haverly et al., 2020). ...
... All members of the learning community need to be aware of power dynamics that ebb and flow in science classrooms, and develop a critical lens to interrogate dominant, and often historically harmful ideologies. Otherwise, educators and students are at risk of perpetuating oppressive practices in science classrooms (e.g., Carlone et al., 2015;Haverly et al., 2020;Vargas & Saetermoe, 2024). ...
... Exploring the target phenomenon, students express their initial ideas about how the phenomenon occurred. In this phase, it is important to ensure that students have equitable opportunities to share their experiences and express their uncertainties to engage in sensemaking of the target phenomenon (Bang et al., 2017;Haverly et al., 2020;Kang, 2022). Students can express their interpretation of the phenomena and bring their everyday experience, everyday language, and cultural background to the joint discussion. ...
... Drawing upon semiotic theory, Oliveira et al. (2012), Tang (2021), and Kirch and Siry (2012) showed that by using hedging expressions (e.g., maybe, might, and could), teachers and students could explicitly communicate uncertainty, leading to the co-construction of shared knowledge. Building on the equitable sensemaking perspective, researchers suggested incorporating students' diverse initial ideas and questions as intellectual resources so that equitable opportunities are provided for them to participate in the subsequent process of sensemaking (e.g., Carlone et al., 2011;Haverly et al., 2020;Kang, 2022;Warren et al., 2001). Kang (2022) contributed to developing teaching strategies to promote equity in sensemaking by attending to students' struggles and needs, interpreting classroom situations with consideration of power dynamics, and taking pedagogical actions to expand equitable opportunities for engagement. ...
... Several studies suggest that problematizing a phenomenon is the first step in the start of sensemaking (e.g., Haverly et al., 2020;Penuel et al., 2022;Phillips et al., 2018;Rapkiewcz et al., 2023;Reiser et al., 2021). The analysis of our data revealed that students were not aware of the learning goal of the sensemaking activity with the presentation of the phenomenon and did not immediately generate ideas related to the target phenomenon. ...
Article
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Sensemaking has been advocated as a core practice of science education to support students in constructing their own understanding through a prolonged trajectory. However, the field lacks a discussion of teaching strategies that can better support students as they develop in the trajectory of sensemaking, which includes four phases: initial engagement with a driving question related to a target phenomenon; identification of incoherence and insufficiency in existing understanding; exploration of multiple resources to help develop plausible explanations; and synthesis of solutions and application of new understanding to interpret the target phenomenon. With the view that students’ scientific uncertainty, including conceptual and epistemic uncertainties, can motivate or drive the trajectory of sensemaking coherent with students’ understanding, this multiple case study examined how two science teachers, one from South Korea and one from the USA, supported students to navigate their scientific uncertainties to shape a trajectory of sensemaking that is coherent to them. Transcripts of video recordings of classroom discourses and student-created artifacts were analyzed. We identified the dynamic nature of students’ scientific uncertainties in the four phases and the teaching strategies in each phase. Three main findings emerged from this study: (1) student uncertainty as a key not only to initiate the trajectory of sensemaking meaningfully but also to continuously develop the trajectory along a coherent pathway, (2) conceptual and epistemic uncertainties having different roles in building different phases of sensemaking, and (3) teaching strategies that support student navigation of scientific uncertainty that drives the trajectory of sensemaking.
... These (disparate) initial beliefs or dispositions served as important elements of their readiness, even though each would become shaped differently across a year of teacher education experiences and teaching experiences. These studies (Anderson et al., 2000;Bismack et al., 2022;Haverly et al., 2020;Smithey, 2008) and others illustrate different ways in which preservice teachers' initial characteristics and/or abilities could serve as building blocks or entry points to support them as a foundation as they continue to develop as teachers. Indeed, each shows how these teachers' initial ideas, beliefs, or practice -while limited in its own right -can serve as an asset on which the preservice teacher can draw over time to continue their development towards becoming a well-started beginner. ...
... Another five studies we reviewed focused specifically on preservice elementary teachers' enactments of their lessons (Dalvi & Wendell, 2017;Haverly et al., 2020;Hernandez & Shroyer, 2017;Wendell et al., 2019Zangori & Forbes, 2013. All five of these studies were conducted in the US, with a range in participants from two to 25 (Table 2). ...
... All five of these studies were conducted in the US, with a range in participants from two to 25 (Table 2). For example, Haverly et al. (2020) conducted case study research with two preservice elementary teachers in a midwestern university in the United States, observing and interviewing them about their science instruction. They found preservice teachers could shift epistemic authority to students when the preservice teachers made space in their instruction for student voice. ...
Article
The work of elementary science teaching is challenging given the wide array of subject matter most teachers are expected to teach and a systematic de-prioritisation of science at these grades. In this literature review (63 papers; 2010–2020), we use a framework of readiness for science teaching. Using this framework allows us to illustrate foundational characteristics and abilities that preservice teachers may start with and develop as they become well-started beginners for elementary teaching in the face of systemic challenges. To this end, we identify what is known from the research literature about the strengths that preservice elementary teachers bring to this difficult work with regard to their characteristics and abilities in addition to the challenges they face, describing a foundation on which preservice teachers can build. We also highlight additional studies that show how teacher education can build on preservice teachers’ strengths and support them in areas that are challenging. We identify themes around novices’ identities, dispositions, emotions, beliefs, attitudes, self-efficacy, knowledge, engagement in and with science practices, lesson planning, and lesson enactment. Finally, we highlight four implications for science teacher educators, noting focal areas that may compensate for challenges preservice elementary teachers face while building on their strengths.
... they bring to bear (Ball, 1993;Rosebery et al., 2016), and pursuing students' contributions in classroom talk and action (Empson & Jacobs, 2008;Hammer et al., 2012). Centering students' contributions has numerous documented benefits for student learning, including but not limited to supporting deeper conceptual understanding (e.g., Radoff et al., 2018), engagement in productive disciplinary activity (e.g., Engle & Conant, 2002;Haverly et al., 2020), and at times broadened forms of disciplinary activity (e.g., Rosebery et al., 2010). In science education, the context for the present study, foregrounding students' contributions is part of the fabric of current K-12 reform efforts (NRC, 2012). ...
... Yet studies of participating teachers' classroom practice often show variable impacts, with some teachers coming to foreground student thinking in their classrooms and others not (Barnhart & van Es, 2018;Franke et al., 1998;Haverly et al., 2020;Levin et al., 2009;Stroupe, 2016;Thompson et al., 2013). Contrasting teacher cases have provided important insights into what may shape responsiveness to student thinking in practice. ...
... Some scholars have theorized teacher and environmental contributions as different types of resources that can impact classroom instruction (Cohen et al., 2003;Haverly et al., 2020;Lampert et al., 2011;Stroupe, 2016). For instance, Cohen et al. argued for a broader theorization of resources in and for instruction that expands beyond "conventional" resources to "personal" and "social" resources contributed by varied actors within the educational ecosystem. ...
Article
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Supporting teachers’ attention and responsiveness to the substance of student thinking is increasingly emphasized across disciplines. Yet studies demonstrate how such responsiveness, in practice, is highly contextualized and often fleeting. This study conceptualizes and examines what functioned as “resources for responsiveness” within and across nine sustained cases of responsiveness in three science teachers’ inquiry-oriented classrooms. Analyses demonstrated how a diverse range of personal, social, and material/structural resources facilitated teachers’ responsiveness, with some commonalities but also much variation across teachers. These findings contribute to the field’s understanding of what may support teachers’ attention and responsiveness to student thinking and suggest the importance of (a) responsiveness in the design and facilitation of professional learning and (b) increased attention to teachers’ affect.
... In classrooms, teachers tend to hold epistemic authority by default; part of the teaching work of supporting student sensemaking, therefore, is to intentionally open up space for ideas, negotiations, and decision-making around "figuring out" to occur. And, because such openings are constituted through interaction, the type of space that is "opened up" for students' sensemaking is highly dependent on teachers' choices and interpretations of student contributions (Haverly et al., 2020;Ko & Krist, 2019;Miller et al., 2018;Rosebery et al., 2016;Schwarz et al., 2021). ...
... Responsive teaching in science education foregrounds the substance of students' ideas; recognizes the disciplinary connections within those ideas; and takes up and pursues the substance of students' thinking (Robertson et al., 2016). Responsive teaching is challenging for both beginning and experienced teachers (e.g., Haverly et al., 2020;Schwarz et al., 2021), in part because it is a complex pedagogical endeavor. Specifically, foregrounding the substance of students' ideas requires careful eliciting of and listening to students' ideas in ways that assure students they will be taken seriously and not immediately evaluated (Hammer et al., 2012;Levin et al., 2009). ...
... The nature of teachers' responsiveness also has implications for which students are provided such opportunities, and which sets of sense-making resourceslived experiences, cultural knowledge and practices, and multiple discursive and linguistic repertoires-are recognized as productive for sense-making (Kang & Anderson, 2015;Suárez, 2020). Thus, there is also a growing consensus in science education that the nature of teachers' responsive practices is central in providing more equitable science instruction (Haverly et al., 2020;Kang, 2022;Rosebery et al., 2016;Schwarz et al., 2021). ...
Article
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Calls to immerse students in the sensemaking practices of science recommend that students propose ideas and work together to construct explanations as well as drive the evaluation and decision-making around classroom knowledge-building. In other words, they should be participating with epistemic agency. Part of the teaching work of supporting student sensemaking, therefore, is to intentionally open up space for student contributions and negotiations during sensemaking. The type of space that is opened up for students’ sensemaking is highly dependent on teachers’ choices and interpretations of student contributions. Accordingly, this paper leverages a teacher noticing framework to begin to characterize the teacher noticing and decision-making involved in supporting students’ epistemic agency while teaching. Using a novel point-of-view video collection methodology, we asked two teachers to identify moments while teaching in which they were making a decision about how to open up or close down space for students’ epistemic agency. We found that both teachers attended similarly to the disciplinary substance of students’ ideas; the epistemic nature of students’ ideas; students’ epistemic stance or orientation during participation; and students’ overall degree of engagement. Teachers’ responses to students varied across pedagogical phenomena, and they also varied in their effectiveness. These variations were related to each teacher’s conception of epistemic agency. We propose that attention to the epistemic nature of students’ responses and to students’ epistemic stance or orientation may be especially important foci of teacher attention for supporting students’ epistemic agency.
... According to Hardman (2019), students can give short responses, ask a question, or provide extended responses requiring a teacher's feedback or probe. In a recent study by Haverly et al. (2020), it was argued that teacher moves are powerful in creating space for sense-making in science classrooms, thus, the need for teachers to be cognisant of the talk moves they use during classroom interaction. Given the fact that science teachers need to respond to student contribution as part of classroom situations (Güler et al., 2020), such that they establish certain discourses (Bansal, 2018;Mortimer & Scott, 2003), in this paper, I want to argue that despite student input that influences the patterns of interaction, the notion of noticing is important for science teachers to drive interaction. ...
... The key player in the interaction is the teacher, who, through the discursive move, directs the interaction (Tytler & Aranda, 2015). According to Chin (2007) and Haverly et al. (2020), one of the key aspects that contribute to the organisation of classroom discourse is the teacher's realisation and/or ignorance of the nature of moves used. With the realisation that teacher talk has a significant contribution to how students engage in the science classroom, there has since been an interest in science classroom talk and characterizing the kinds of discourses that could take place in science classrooms (see Mortimer & Scott, 2003). ...
... For the teacher to employ a suitable move that could result in a prolonged interaction and dialogic discourse, they must note and respond at the right moment to a student's contribution (Haverly et al., 2020;Luna, 2018). The moves that the teacher uses are called rejoinders (Correnti et al., 2015) conceptualised by Tytler and Aranda (2015) as having three broad categories. ...
Article
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Teachers’ responses to student contributions in science classroom influence the resulting classroom interaction. To establish a heightened interaction, teachers need to use specific discursive moves. Using the notion of noticing as a lens, in this qualitative case study, I report on how the notion of noticing and responding with a suitable discursive move is important for science teachers to drive interaction. I use data from two South African science teachers’ lessons and video-stimulated recall interviews (VSRI) to show instances where they employed specific discursive moves as a result of noticing and the interaction unfolded in a dialogic manner and instances where they ‘failed’ to notice a pertinent feature of a student’s contribution and the interaction did not move beyond the initiation-response-evaluation (IRE) triad. I discuss the significance of teacher noticing in science classrooms as it influences how the interaction unfolds. I also offer implications for pre-service science teacher education.
... To create equitable opportunities for learning, it is important for teachers to invite and value students' resources by drawing on everyday experiences, discursive forms, and cultural practices that often go unacknowledged in traditional science classrooms (Haverly et al., 2020;Levine et al., 2020;Maskiewicz & Winters, 2012;Nasir et al., 2014;Warren et al., 2001). Calabrese Barton and Tan (2009) argue for science to a be a hybrid space where students engage in authentic disciplinary learning relevant to their everyday lives. ...
... Beyond inviting and valuing students' resources, it is important for teachers to "make space" for students to take ownership of science sensemaking by ceding epistemic agency to their students (Haverly et al., 2020, p. 64). Specifically, teachers can make space for equitable sensemaking by sharing airtime with students, foregrounding students' ideas, admitting mistakes, and inviting students to jump in with their solutions (Haverly et al., 2020). These practices enable students to lead inquiry and direct the "science storyline" in their classrooms (Reiser et al., 2017(Reiser et al., , 2021, disrupting the traditional power dynamic between the teacher and the students. ...
... This approach could communicate to students that each of their ideas was a valuable starting point for sensemaking. He hoped that this lesson would build students' confidence in themselves "as scientists" [PD 4], because they ultimately controlled the design and interpretation of their experiment (Haverly et al., 2020). Rather than reinforcing "misconceptions," playing out their initial ideas in the context of Jack's persistent questions enabled students to bridge from their initial ideas to canonical understandings. ...
Article
Research has explored how science teachers can create equitable learning environments. In addition, research demonstrates that representations can be powerful tools for supporting disciplinary learning and inviting and leveraging students’ diverse ideas and practices. Yet, professional development (PD) about representations has primarily focused on teachers’ knowledge of disciplinary practices rather than on how teachers can value and build upon students’ representations as resources for equitable sensemaking. In this paper, we present cases from a year-long professional development program with in-service elementary teachers designed to support science teaching with representations. Through our work with these teachers, we have illustrated an approach to using representations that supports equitable sensemaking by: (1) making space for students to create personally meaningful representations, (2) amplifying students’ representations, and (3) helping students iteratively refine their representations and ideas. These findings extend literature about inclusive science teaching by illustrating how focusing on students’ representations can support equitable sensemaking and by addressing tensions that emerge between equitable teaching, science standards that prioritize canonical knowledge and practices, and monoglossic language ideologies.
... Children who are exposed to science instruction early develop positive attitudes and interest in science (Eshach & Fried, 2005); when this does not happen, interest in science may drop off (Mullis & Jenkins, 1988). However, children from communities that experience unequal distribution of resources and power, or who are part of groups that have been historically marginalized in science, tend not to have access to equitable science instruction (see Haverly et al., 2020). Gaps in opportunities that begin early are amplified later in schooling and career choice (Mbamalu, 2001), creating an urgent need to attend to inequities embedded in science for ECE. ...
... Given EC classrooms are often self-contained and emphasize socio-emotional development, EC teachers are positioned to notice, explore, and connect with children's differing cultural and linguistic resources, lived experiences, and value systems. This relational work can support a classroom community in which children feel safe and valued, shifting historicized positions of power (Haverly et al., 2020). Further, EC teachers' proficiency in literacy instruction can be reimagined as an asset to facilitate science sensemaking -a collective discourse-rich endeavor (NRC, 2007). ...
... First, the perspective on EC science in this chapter emphasizes young children's equitable sensemaking (Haverly et al., 2020), which underscores that children do not explore and investigate everyday phenomena equally (Cannella, 1997 Third, just as a holistic child-centered perspective presses beyond a focus on learning content, so too should teacher preparation include serious attention to non-cognitive factors. In recent years, there has been a groundswell of research on teacher identity, which is conceptualized as socially constructed, fluid, dynamic, complex and multifaceted (Avraamidou, 2016). ...
Chapter
This is a pre-print, reviewed and accept version of the manuscript. This chapter explores what is known about preparing early childhood teachers for science teaching. A review of recent research literature revealed findings closely related to those from elementary teacher preparation, with the majority addressing how various interventions, predominantly in science methods courses, shape preservice teachers’ knowledge and beliefs about science, the nature of science, and science teaching. A subset of studies examines preservice teachers’ interactions with children, the development of science teaching practices, and issues of equity and access. These studies are complementary with emergent perspectives on science in early childhood that privilege children’s innate curiosity about the world and drive to figure things out; consider the whole child, including their multiple and embodied ways of knowing; and foreground disrupting unjust interactions in science. Building from the review findings, the authors call for a holistic, asset-based approach to designing and studying teacher preparation for science in early childhood, including opportunities for candidates to investigate science alongside children. The authors raise questions about expertise, language, and power for the field, and expand the emphasis on teacher knowledge to address identity, a pedagogy of listening and responsiveness, an inquiry stance toward teaching and learning, and a strong social justice orientation.
... However, some scholars argue that even these high-quality (inquirybased, mastery) opportunities for engagement in science discourse need to be critically examined for how dominant discursive conventions may be valued and upheld, and in turn, how the speech genres of racial/ ethnic and linguistic marginalized groups may be excluded in science classrooms. Learning to participate in science talk often requires historically marginalized students to navigate different ways of thinking and acting across lived worlds, and at times, the cultural mismatch between mainstream science discourse and the native and cultural discourses of their home lives can maintain inequities in access to science learning (Brown et al., 2005;Calabrese Barton et al., 2008;Gutiérrez, 2008;Haverly, Calabrese Barton, Schwarz, & Braaten, 2020;Thompson, 2014). Therefore, we also draw from literature that focuses squarely on approaches aimed to encourage diverse forms of participation in science discourse. ...
... Funds of knowledge refer to historically rooted and culturally developed knowledge and skills that are fundamental to practice in students' households and communities (González & Moll, 2002;Moll et al., 1992). Positioning students as agents of their learning is also crucial to this aim; that is, treating students as meaningful contributors to the knowledge and practices of their classroom community (Haverly et al., 2020;Miller, Manz, Russ, Stroupe, & Berland, 2018;Stroupe, 2014). The importance of such asset-based pedagogies and cultural relevance in the curriculum has a long history in education research (e.g., Gutiérrez et al., 1999;Ladson-Billings, 1995) and is increasingly acknowledged in educational psychology (e.g., DeCuir-Gunby & Schutz, 2014;Fong, Alejandro, Krou, Segovia, & Johnston-Ashton, 2019;Graham, 2018;Gray et al., 2020;Kumar, Karabenick, Warnke, Hany, & Seay, 2019;Matthews & López, 2019;Schmidt, Kafkas, Maier, Shumow, & Kackar-Cam, 2019). ...
... Finally, it is important to understand that teachers' ability to create HDS operate within organizations, and structural barriers in low-income schools may hinder this effort. Prominent examples include the accountability pressures that limit teachers' instructional autonomy, particularly in terms of allowing students to direct the flow of a lesson in a way that may diverge from memorizing science content aligned to high-stakes standardized assessments (e.g., Haverly et al., 2020;Hayes & Trexler, 2016;Ko & Krist, 2019). In many ways, the classroom norms and practices of HDS go "against the cultural grain" of schooling (Hammer, 1997, p. 520). ...
Article
In this mixed methods study, we applied both engagement and sociocultural (hybridity) frameworks to understand the dynamic nature of student engagement in science discourse. We qualitatively examined features of hybrid discourse spaces (where students’ everyday and academic discourses are integrated) as students engaged in science talk activities by analyzing seven middle school science classrooms. We also quantitatively examined the relationships among instructional practices and science engagement (N = 101 students) using bifactor exploratory structural equation modeling (bESEM). Findings showed that science discourse occurred primarily in traditional spaces and was largely directed by the teacher. However, within the smaller subset of hybrid spaces, small group discourse formats and shared or student-directed agency were more prevalent compared to traditional and everyday spaces. Qualitative themes showed how students’ agency, identities, and knowledge bases across lived worlds co-exist in hybrid discourse spaces. The bESEM showed that instructional practices associated with high quality and equity-focused instruction relate differentially to specific dimensions of engagement, demonstrating most consistent relationships with affective engagement. The variable representing funds of knowledge connections was only related to cognitive engagement. The integrated findings demonstrate the potential of hybrid discourse spaces and point to practices for supporting equitable student engagement in science discourse. Implications for practice and lines for future research are discussed.
... We report on the final year of a four-year, ongoing PD effort with 14 elementary teachers, most of whom teach large populations of multilingual learners. The PD has consistently emphasized: 1) a centrality of representations in eliciting and being responsive to students' thinking and 2) "making space" for students' heterogeneous sensemaking (Bell et al., 2021;Haverly, et al., 2018). Here, we report on an emergent framework-Surface, Recognize, Leverage (SRL)-co-developed with teacherparticipants. ...
... During the last two years, a responsive goal of our PD project focused on how teachers can "make space" (Bell et al., 2021;Haverly et al., 2018) for students to bring their personal experiences into the classroom for science learning. Our work engaged teachers, in community, to reflect about how they validated and supported students' multiple ways of knowing and being for sensemaking. ...
... However, for engineering design experiences to be sites of knowledge building, students need support to engage in sense-making, both individually and collectively. Sense-making involves developing understandings of the world through generating, using, and refining one's ideas in interaction with other people, representations, tools, and objects (Schwarz et al., 2020). In this paper we consider how Design Talks-intentionally planned and facilitated whole-class conversations that can be incorporated in engineering design lessons-can "make space" for students' sense-making about engineering problems and solutions and position them with epistemic authority to contribute to the class's collective thinking (Engle & Conant, 2002;Haverly et al., 2020). ...
... Sense-making involves developing understandings of the world through generating, using, and refining one's ideas in interaction with other people, representations, tools, and objects (Schwarz et al., 2020). In this paper we consider how Design Talks-intentionally planned and facilitated whole-class conversations that can be incorporated in engineering design lessons-can "make space" for students' sense-making about engineering problems and solutions and position them with epistemic authority to contribute to the class's collective thinking (Engle & Conant, 2002;Haverly et al., 2020). ...
... The role of teacher discourse was also examined in the next case study. Haverly et al. (2020) conducted a case study that examined the sensemaking moments of novice science teachers located in the Midwestern United States facilitating elementary classroom discussions. Students' engagement with ideas and sensemaking of science play an important role in science learning. ...
... The focal papers reviewed in this chapter each drew from varied data sets. Indepth analysis can be drawn primarily from one type of data, such as the ethnographic interviews in the study by Page-Reeves et al. (2019), or a variety of data sources, such as by the study of Haverly et al. (2020). Through the processes of analyses, qualitative researchers interpret and produce multiple texts (spoken, written, symbolic, embodied). ...
... In this next iteration of the Language Storybook activity, we included significant time for small-group discussion wherein facilitators worked to tie the discussion of big ideas to practical, real-world stories about how these issues might play out. Our goal was to support teachers to recognize the work involved in "making space" for (Haverly et al., 2020) and seeing connections between children's everyday repertoires and collaborative science sensemaking (Warren et al., 2020) which benefits all learners, but has particular importance for those from marginalized communities. As our analysis shows, this facilitation, combined with the introduction of both the Language Storybook and the Jonathan and the Sun discussion, was more successful in shifting the PD community towards antideficit discussions of teaching and learning including perspectives of equity-as-transformation, particularly with regard to marginalized students and their science learning capabilities. ...
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In this paper, we examine how researchers and teachers in a multi-year professional development program shifted their conceptualizations of equity. Following (Grapin et al (2023) Sci Educ 107:999–1032), we ground our analysis in two conceptualizations of equity that exist across fields: equity-as-access (learners should have access to disciplinary knowledge, practices, and career paths) and equity-as-transformation (learners should transform what it means to learn and participate in disciplines). In this study, we describe a professional development (PD) design initially intended to support equitable science teaching and learning by focusing on representations. This initial framing did not distinguish between conceptions of equity-as-access versus equity-as-transformation. As a result, the PD did not provide facilitators or teachers with resources for ideological sensemaking towards equity-as-transformation. Catalyzed by teachers’ request for PD focused on multilingual learners (MLs), we noticed aspects of our design that offered only images of equity-as-access. In response, we designed activities for teachers that offered space and resources for considering equity-as-transformation. As a case study (Yin (2014) Case study research: design and methods, SAGE) using interaction analysis (Jordan and Henderson (1995) J Learn Sci 4:39–103) of PD videos, we describe how we PD activities and facilitation strategies to integrate transformative conceptualizations of equity. These findings have implications for both research and practice. In terms of research, they demonstrate the importance of using multiple lenses to consider equity in science classrooms. In terms of practice, they underscore the importance of providing teachers with opportunities to explicitly connect new perspectives of equity with day-to-day experiences of classroom teaching.
... Adapting modeling activities to maximize studentcentered choices allows for this shift in agency. Teachers can 'make space' for student ownership of science sensemaking by sharing airtime, foregrounding students' ideas, and inviting them to offer solutions (Haverly et al., 2020). These actions allow students to lead inquiries, shape the science storyline, and disrupt the traditional power dynamics typically present in classrooms. ...
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This study explores the adaptations made by elementary school teachers to promote student Productive Disciplinary Engagement (PDE) during modeling activities within an online learning context. PDE means students make collective intellectual progress by using disciplinary practices and ideas to formulate possible solutions or answers. Given the abrupt transition to remote education instigated by the COVID-19 pandemic, student engagement and hands-on learning opportunities have faced significant challenges. This study adopts a collective case study design with an interpretivist perspective, investigating three fourth-grade teachers over the 2020-2021 school year. We collected multiple data sources, including professional learnings, observations, teacher interviews, and student artifacts. The study identified four significant themes pertaining to teacher adaptations that corresponded with increased students' PDE: leverage technology tools for constructing models; maximize student-centered choice and position students as epistemic agents in modeling; incorporate family and community resources for modeling; and utilize students' diverse knowledge and expertise in modeling. These findings contribute to our understanding of effective strategies for promoting student engagement and the practical application of scientific modeling in online learning environments.
... The emphasis lies on teacher actions and strategies aimed at creating space for students' uncertainties and leveraging them to drive students' sensemaking practices, encouraging the generation of hypothetical claims, seeking potential solutions, and applying newly acquired knowledge to both past experiences and novel situations. This type of space for sensemaking is heavily reliant on teachers' responsive teaching, interpretations, and actions concerning students' scientific uncertainties (Haverly et al., 2020;Ko & Krist, 2019). ...
... To describe the phenomenon, students were asked to "compare and contrast a mother and her baby, then write about ways the baby is similar to its mother." During the second summer PD, teachers were asked to consider how they could make space (Haverly et al., 2020). One way this was demonstrated was through our use of a Summary Chart. ...
... Supporting previous literature, teachers struggled culturally with maintaining students' virtual STEM engagement and collaboration (Baldwin, 2019). While these issues have previously been defined in terms of facilitating in-person collaboration and engagement (Braaten & Sheth, 2017;Haverly et al., 2020), teachers here grappled with sustaining their online learning communities. This trend seemed to be connected with the digital inequities teachers perceived regarding students' accessibility to technology and the internet (Code et al., 2020), as well as not being able to hold "live" discussions central to their in-person STEM instruction (Baldwin, 2019). ...
Article
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The past two decades have shown a rising global trend to offer online K-12 STEM learning, necessitating teachers to have the knowledge and skills to navigate online teaching contexts. However, related professional development and online STEM best teaching practices remain to be fully articulated. This issue was exacerbated following the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak that pushed most teachers into emergency remote teaching (ERT) roles without preparation. As such, this study explores secondary master STEM teachers’ (e.g., > 8 years of STEM teaching experience) transitions to ERT, classifying and categorizing what tensions they encountered in the process. Survey methods and open coding were used to collect and analyze data emphasizing teachers’ perceived challenges in shifting to ERT. Findings suggest that while participants had considerable STEM teaching experience, they encountered converging conceptual, pedagogical, cultural, and political tensions connected within ERT contexts. Results offer tangible starting points for supporting teachers in transitioning to online STEM environments.
... At the same time, science identity is enhanced when students have opportunities to bring themselves to the process of scientific inquiry. As they "do science" in their classrooms and bring their questions, their wonderings, experiences, sense-making practices, and knowledge to bear on scientific inquiry, they develop their scientific selves (e.g., Haverly et al., 2020). Finally, a science identity is nurtured when students see others (e.g., teachers) of similar racial and ethnic backgrounds who actively participate in scientific activities (Lee & Buxton, 2010). ...
Article
Science texts tend to privilege the voices, perspectives, and practices of White males (e.g., Ford, 2006), reinforcing widely‐held perceptions of scientists as White men. This narrow portrayal of who “does science” discourages BIPOC or female students from building a science identity (Archer et al., 2015), with many such students also viewing science as difficult or undesirable (Brickhouse et al., 2000). We argue that intentional positioning of science text written by or about BIPOC or female figures in science and literacy instruction not only helps all students develop science and literacy skills and knowledge, but leads to more expansive views of who “does science” and fosters students’ science identities. Our purpose in this article is to help teachers identify and incorporate expansive informational texts and position these texts within sound science and literacy instruction. We draw from the Next Generation Science Standards to describe ways to develop students’ science identities and then provide teachers guidance for selecting and intentionally positioning expansive science texts in their instruction, with examples of text sets that teachers can use in their classrooms.
... Recent studies on responsive teaching and culturally relevant pedagogy shed some light on this process (Aronson & Laughter, 2016;Brown, 2017;Kang, 2022;Ladson-Billings, 1995;Ladson-Billings, 2000). Despite this progress, studies that document and exemplify responsive teaching often analyze teachers' reflections on classroom implementation and call for more insight into the student perspective (Haverly et al., 2020) or ways to more "fully see the role of students' lived experiences and their participation in multiple communities in shaping science understanding" (Thompson et al., 2016, p. 7). In particular, researchers and policymakers demand more insight into the experiences of Latinx students as one of the youngest and fastest growing demographics in the United States (Lopez et al., 2018). ...
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Researchers and practitioners in the United States increasingly promote phenomena‐based instruction in science that supports the development of a coherent storyline throughout the unit. Questions about who is constructing the science storyline and how still remain. Employing a qualitative ethnographic case study approach, we explore how three Latinx female students authentically contribute in their high school chemistry class and change the science storyline originally developed by the teacher. Data include over 950 min of video recordings, student artifacts, and interviews collected from a unit about reaction rate, which was contextualized by students' experiences with a local wildfire. The analysis points to three instructional moves that appear to play an important role in shifting the collective storyline: connecting to Latinx students' personal concerns, moving across multiple figured worlds, and recognizing students' epistemological contributions. Implications for supporting minoritized students are discussed.
... An important subset of these practices aim to support students' epistemic agency. Various scholars have argued that supporting students to take up roles as active and agentic knowledge producers is key to creating learning environments that are both more conceptually rigorous and more inclusive than classrooms characterized by didactic, teacher-centered instruction (Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators, 2017; Engle & Conant, 2002;Haverly et al., 2020;Schoenfeld & the Teaching for Robust Understanding Project, 2016;Vaughn, 2018;Zhang et al., 2022). ...
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... Conversely, Han and Gutierez (2021) used the PDE framework to show how a passive female science student came to experience curiosity and joy as she grew more confident in her abilities and accepted by her groupmates. Finally, Haverly et al. (2020) used the framework to examine how novice teachers can make space for "equitable sense-making" (p. 63). ...
Conference Paper
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Productive disciplinary engagement (PDE) and expansive framing are among the most widely used educational design principles grounded in situative theories of cognition. Because they insist that learners "problematize" content from their own perspective, these principles are compatible with contemporary "asset-based" efforts to support diversity, equity, and inclusion. This paper systematically reviews scholarship advancing that claim. The reviewed body of work shows how educational practices that sustain the unique competencies of historically marginalized groups can also support "generative" learning that transfers readily and widely to dominant and non-dominant contexts for learning, achieving, working, and living.
... Finally, Haverly et al. (2020) used the PDE framework to explore how novice teachers (in this case, two interns and one first-year teacher) can make space for students' sense-making. They suggested that equitable science classrooms are characterized by teachers distributing authority through shared ideas and treating these as epistemic resources. ...
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Helping teachers move beyond the pedagogical practices they experienced as students represents an enduring problem in teacher education. Even when they experience more creative alternatives during preparatory coursework, they often have trouble transferring these approaches to their clinical practice. This paper systematically reviews scholarship on two constructs from the situative tradition, productive disciplinary engagement (PDE) and expansive framing, that hold potential for promoting instructional transformation and transfer. We find that both constructs illuminate core issues in teacher learning, but that, as pedagogical tools in themselves, expansive framing is more easily taken up by teachers than PDE is. We conclude by advancing a view of theoretical synergy between the two frameworks that could hold promise for future efforts towards encouraging instructional transformation and transfer.
... view such decisions as a lack of value for or a concession to constraints instead of supporting such sensemaking discussions (e.g., Haverly et al., 2020;Schwarz et al., 2021). In this way, this study demonstrates how a single teacher might reason in complex ways through their enactment of a range of pedagogical responses that might variably be seen as expanding, maintaining, or shutting down sense-making. ...
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Teaching to support students' sense-making is challenging. It requires continuous, context-dependent decision-making about which student ideas to pursue, when, how, and why. This paper presents a single case study of an experienced teacher, Nadine, as an illustrative case in order to provide a rich description of this teacher's decisional episodes. Specifically , we characterize Nadine's pedagogical reasoning for decisions to make space for or close down student sense-making while facilitating whole-class discussions. We analyzed video recordings of (1) Nadine's classroom teaching over the course of two instructional units, (2) classroom moments tagged by Nadine or researchers in the midst of her teaching capturing her rationales for instructional decisions , and (3) interviews about those tagged moments. Using constant-comparative analytic methods, we identified three dimensions of criteria that Nadine considered in her decisions about whether to pursue student ideas: (1) disciplinary potential, (2) potential for fostering the classroom community, and (3) curricular considerations. We present four episodes that feature Nadine's reasoning, two in which she intentionally made space for student sense-making and two in which she intentionally closed down lines of student
... Among these are creating multiple opportunities to elicit and interpret student thinking and supporting equitable participation for students as they engage in ongoing discussions of their evolving explanatory models of how and why events happen (NGSS Lead States, 2013;Penuel & Reiser, 2018). Instruction that centralizes discussion of students' explanations intertwines rich classroom discourse with rigorous tasks that are designed to make space for students' ideas and tools to support responsive and equitable science instruction (Colley & Windschitl, 2016;Haverly et al., 2020;Tekkumru-Kisa et al., 2015). For teachers, this demands much greater attention to and interpretation of students' thinking (Cartier et al., 2013). ...
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This study investigates challenges of enactment teachers notice when analyzing artifacts of teaching in a professional development focused on supporting the enactment of NGSS‐aligned modeling instruction. Five secondary science teachers participated in a semester‐long video club. Transcripts of the segments of their meetings in which they analyzed artifacts of practice were coded to characterize what they noticed in videos and student work samples from their own and others’ classrooms of students engaging in sensemaking. Through an inductive and iterative approach, three main linguistic challenges were identified related to the teachers’ noticing of students’ disciplinary thinking: learning how to communicate with precision using modeling conventions, how to communicate with precision using scientific vocabulary, and how to support students explaining and defending their models. The findings of this study extend and affirm prior research on teachers’ noticing of student thinking by highlighting the integrated nature of disciplinary noticing and the entanglement of learning science concepts and the language of science. The results also indicate that artifact‐rich professional development designed to improve science teachers’ interpretation of their students’ thinking can support teachers as they work through problems of practice they encounter in their attempts to enact responsive science teaching.
... In science classrooms, equitable academic expectations and achievement are measured against mastery of NGSS performance expectations (NGSS Lead States, 2013). The performance expectations are composed of integrated core science ideas, science and engineering practices, and crosscutting concepts that engage students in the practices of science and provides them with opportunities to access their own sensemaking strategies to construct explanations of phenomenon in their everyday world (Haverly et al., 2020). ...
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Science content, teaching, and teacher preparation are all political acts. However, accepting the political nature of science as well as that of science teaching has proven to be a hard shift for many in the science community. In this paper, we suggest a shift away from an apolitical teaching of science toward a system of practices that transforms the purposes of science education through a justice-centered science pedagogy approach. For science teachers to engage their students in this type of transformative teaching and learning, we argue that the science teachers themselves need to be immersed in conditions under which their learning experiences foregrounds the transformative power of justice centered science pedagogy. In this study, we explore a residency program, and in particular, a secondary science methods course in which pre-service teachers engaged in a social justice project exploring social justice science issues to illustrate preservice teachers’ conceptualizations of justice-centered science teaching and learning.
... In science classrooms, equitable academic expectations and achievement are measured against mastery of NGSS performance expectations (NGSS Lead States, 2013). The performance expectations are composed of integrated core science ideas, science and engineering practices, and crosscutting concepts that engage students in the practices of science and provides them with opportunities to access their own sensemaking strategies to construct explanations of phenomenon in their everyday world (Haverly et al., 2020). ...
... Though focal investigations varied across classrooms over iterations of the unit, our analysis demonstrates the central role of emotional configurations in how students responded to dynamic and emergent phenomena, and, in turn, how the teacher responded to dynamic and emergent feelings expressed by the students. In light of the recent emphasis in science education on honoring students' epistemologies (Warren et al., 2020) and making space for students' epistemic authority (Haverly et al., 2020), attending to emotional configurations offers researchers and educators a way to conceptualize learning independent from specific curricular pathways or "storylines" (Edelson et al., 2021;Reiser et al., 2021). ...
Article
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Attending to emotion in science classrooms can expand the range of resources valued for science learning, and it can offer insights into students' investigations. However, research that characterizes emotion as a part of disciplinary science learning is relatively nascent. In response, we explore the dynamic relationships between feelings, sensemaking, and practices in a sixth‐grade STEM classroom, guided by (a) Kimmerer's (2013) account of braiding Eurocentric disciplinary science with other resources, including feelings, and (b) Vea's (2020) framework of emotional configurations. We analyze data from multiple iterations of a 9‐week curriculum about guppies' survival needs and the dynamics of ecosystems, illustrating how students' feelings and their sensemaking through practices involving observation were intertwined in generative and mutually‐reinforcing ways. First, we show how the teacher and researcher made space for students to express feelings, in part in response to a student who used feelings to challenge “business as usual” classroom discourse on a day when guppies were discovered to have died. Then, we show how, in subsequent implementations, feelings, sensemaking, and practices were braided together to shape classroom investigations. We argue that attending to feelings in this way, as valued resources to be integrated with sensemaking and practices, is an important step toward equitable science teaching and learning and toward understanding learning in student‐driven contexts.
... We see learning as a process of developing cultural practices through social interactions with others (Nasir et al., 2014). From this stance, we see heterogeneity as fundamental to learning (Rosebery et al., 2010) and believe that students learn best when they consider a wealth of diverse ideas (Haverly et al., 2020) and engage in expansive forms of science practices (Schwarz et al., 2022). We thus question the value of automated assessment that fits students' understandings into predetermined boxes. ...
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In this commentary, we respond to the recent article Applying machine learning to automatically assess scientific models by Zhai et al. (2022). The authors present automated assessment as a solution to the problem of limited time for assessment in middle school science classrooms. Drawing from our collective expertise in science assessment, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and culturally relevant and linguistically responsive pedagogy, we argue that there are significant limitations to the current applications of AI for formative assessment practices. Although we believe that these limitations extend to all students, we are particularly concerned about the implications for students from nondominant cultural and linguistic backgrounds. We first share our understanding of AI's role in formative assessment, with reference to the paper by Zhai and colleagues. Next, we ask whether AI can effectively assess students' emergent sensemaking and then consider whether we should use AI for purposes of formative assessment. Finally, we discuss how we can better use AI for formative assessment.
... The criteria mentioned in the study are the objectives, extended learning for driving multiple experience, collaboration in groups and external participation. Through these features, educators should collect evidence of leaners progress in informal and formal assessments (Haverly, Calabrese Barton, Schwarz, & Braaten, 2020). Therefore, educators need to experiment with the best strategies in order to evaluate students learning skills. ...
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Individualised learning is the fundamental facet in acquiring knowledge through one’s personal experience and learning. It addresses specific teaching methods, instructional strategies and specific assessments requirements, which are believed to achieve a beneficial outcome to the learning ability of students at their own pace. In mass communication education, project-based learning provides opportunities for students to combine classroom knowledge and real-world industry experience that centres around their own interest and skills. Reflective report, when written from the student’s point of view, is an assessment tool that can leverage the advantages of project-based learning by giving academician insights on the progress of the student. To date, there has been little research on the best evaluation method for project-based learning in mass communication studies. The paper will focus on analysing reflective report as a tool to indicate individualized learning in mass communication project-based module. This research uses data collected from students' reflective report scripts using qualitative content analysis method. The coding for this research was drawn from Gibb’s reflective cycle model. A total of 25 samples (n=25) with a summation of 236 codes were analysed using deductive reasoning methods. The result of this study shows that students can describe their personalised experience, attain goals and evaluate their own progress, so reflective report can be used as an evaluation tool to track individualised learning. This study concludes that students who attempted project-based module are able to set their own learning path and pursue their own goals based on their interest and skills.
... Building from the culturally sustaining pedagogy framework within the context of STEM education, we start with a view that children should be engaging in sensemaking through the engagement in the practices of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians to develop knowledge of the big ideas of the different disciplines [52,53]. Despite common conceptions that children cannot engage in abstract thinking, even young children won-der about their world, develop ideas about phenomena around them, and are able to reason with these ideas to explain natural phenomena and solve problems with proper support [54,55] However, students are often not given the space and resources (e.g., science ideas for reasoning, opportunities to engage in investigation) needed to engage in this sensemaking [55,56]. However, cultural connections lend themselves to be integral in students' learning since they can serve as instances of transfer for knowledge beyond the classroom. ...
Article
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Historically, STEM learning spaces and curriculum have overlooked the strengths and agency of students, teachers, and their communities. Project-based STEM units about environmental issues like water quality offer the possibility to create more expansive, equitable learning experiences. These units can leverage local problems and resources while also including the global dimensions of the issue to provide meaningful opportunities for diverse student sensemaking. However, even project-based STEM learning requires explicit attention to the agency of teachers, students, and place. In order to identify a set of design principles for supporting equitable learning in a project-based STEM curriculum, this manuscript brings together a set of empirical and theoretical frameworks including teacher participatory relationship with the curriculum, culturally sustaining pedagogy, critical pedagogy of place, and equitable sensemaking. The authors use these frameworks to describe a conceptual model of Participatory Relationship of Students, Communities, Teachers, Curriculum and Place. Then, the manuscript outlines a set of seven design principles that connect to the theoretical frameworks to the conceptual model and provide implementation strategies with examples of how we apply these design principles to a project-based STEM unit for 4–8 grade students. The design principles have implications for design of future project-based units and learning opportunities for teachers and students.
... 26(3) SETIEMBRE-DICIEMBRE, 2022 Revisión de antecedentes y teorías de apoyo Son varias las investigaciones que se han desarrollado a partir del estudio de las aptitudes científicas. Se pueden mencionar a Haverly et al. (2020), quienes evaluaron, en un estudio de caso, la poca existencia de estrategias que le permitieran al personal docente llevar a cabo la educación científica, indican que este intenta conocer la forma en cómo el estudiantado responde a ciertas situaciones académicas; sin embargo, no reconoce a menudo estos momentos, por lo cual se le dificulta guiar los procesos académicos y dar el sentido científico a las discusiones en clase. ...
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Objetivo. El propósito principal del estudio fue analizar la percepción del personal docente y estudiantado de 5.to grado de básica primaria en relación con el desarrollo cognitivo y las competencias científicas. Metodología. Se consideró un enfoque descriptivo cuantitativo, donde se tomó una muestra de 101 estudiantes de 5° y un grupo de 18 docentes de básica primaria en una institución educativa de la región caribe colombiana, a quienes se les aplicaron encuestas procesadas con los parámetros de la estadística descriptiva, tratados a partir de la distribución de frecuencias, el análisis porcentual y las medidas de tendencia. Resultados. Se obtuvo que, desde la perspectiva estudiantil, el bajo rendimiento académico se asocia con la poca comprensión de los temas desarrollados en el aula, a consecuencia de las metodologías implementadas y desde la visión docente, las dificultades académicas se asocian al bajo desarrollo de los procesos cognitivos y a la apatía del estudiantado frente a sus estudios. Conclusiones. Los resultados indican que, en cuanto a las competencias científicas, el estudiantado presenta un desempeño limitado en procesos que evidencian la comprensión, construcción y análisis del conocimiento científico y desde la práctica docente se hace necesario fortalecer conocimientos asociados a las prácticas científicas en el aula. Se determinó que dentro de los factores que limitan el desarrollo cognitivo del estudiantado se encuentran las prácticas pedagógicas tradicionales; no obstante, el personal docente reconoce la importancia de las competencias científicas, acompañadas de estrategias pedagógicas innovadoras que favorezcan su desarrollo.
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Considering the increasing severity of environmental disasters and the scarcity of studies centered on children’s perspectives, this article explores context-based learning to create spaces of hope. Constructing explanations fosters meaning creation and knowledge integration. Fourth graders’ self-explanations about contamination in a degraded area, known as an “environmen- tal sacrifice zone”, were analyzed. The educational research design within a humanistic paradigm aimed to be responsive to participants’ needs. Children’s explanations were gathered through interviews and images. The qualitative thematic ana- lysis identified three types of explanations and six causal factors. Some students did not recognize the local contamina- tion despite its relevance to their daily lives. In contrast, others associated and contrasted the phenomena with earthquakes and tsunamis that could lead to disasters. The participants expressed socioscientific reasoning, revealing causal relation- ships, involving agents of damage, and highlighting environ- mental injustice as a consequence. Facilitating dialogues with children living in at-risk areas is interpreted as a restorative action in education and advocating for their right to be heard on matters that affect them. This article discusses the role of responsive research in context-based science learning, empha- sizing the opportunities to mediate human actions and foster spaces of hope and awareness in connection with environ- mental justice issues.
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More research is needed to understand how Teacher Candidates (TCs) develop translanguaging stances and shift towards justice-centered science pedagogies. Using interviews and classroom observations, we describe how three elementary TCs drew on learning from their teacher education program to develop translanguaging stances in their science teaching. These stances in turn moved them towards more expansive, multimodal, and interdisciplinary pedagogies. This study offers insight for teachers, teacher educators, and researchers, in increasingly racially and linguistically diverse contexts. It demonstrates how investing in the development of translanguaging stances with teacher candidates can lead to more expansive and justice-oriented practices in elementary science classrooms.
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This is a study intended to address white supremacy in science education. To accomplish this, we describe how one White intern, Boaz, learned to teach science in anti‐racist ways. By detailing how whiteness mattered in his learning to teach, we demonstrate that whiteness is potentially constant in White peoples' learning to teach science in anti‐racist ways. However, we conclude by suggesting that critical whiteness ambitious science teacher education, a merging of critical whiteness pedagogy with practice‐based science teacher education provides a potential way to address the presence of whiteness in science teacher education.
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Science practice introduces inevitable uncertainties that are desirable for learning. Yet, navigating student scientific uncertainties can be a challenge for teachers. This qualitative study explored how teachers perceive and utilize uncertainty during science instruction. Analysis of interviews and classroom observations collected from 14 middle school teachers in the United States indicated limited awareness of uncertainty's use as a resource in science. Teachers perceived uncertainty as a way to induce curiosity and persist through struggle; however, they were quick to reduce students' scientific uncertainty throughout lessons. Findings suggest that teachers need support to understand how uncertainty navigation can benefit student learning.
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Research has demonstrated that pre-service teachers (PSTs) can learn to notice students’ thinking in sophisticated ways by analyzing videos of classroom interactions. What is less clear is how PSTs use what they notice about student thinking to inform how they respond. Secondary math and science PSTs from three teacher preparation programs were invited to analyze a video clip identifying noteworthy moments of student thinking and describing an instructional move they might make and why. A qualitative analysis of their responses indicates that the PSTs overwhelmingly noticed both the substance and the source of students’ ideas. However, the patterns in their responses to these moments varied. These findings suggest that PSTs would benefit from spending more time unpacking what it means to respond to students’ thinking. The study provides implications for teacher education concerning the careful selection of classroom clips and tools to support novice teachers developing responsive teaching practices.
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Sensemaking is conceptualized as a trajectory to develop better understanding and is advocated as one of the fundamental practices in science education. However, the field is lacking of a framework to view the prolonged process of sensemaking that starts from a raise of uncertainty of a target phenomenon to a grasping of a better understanding of a target phenomenon. The process requires teachers to recognize the role of scientific uncertainty in different phases of sensemaking and develop responsive instructional supports to help students navigate the uncertainties. With an attention on student scientific uncertainty as a potential driver of the trajectory of sensemaking, this study aims to identify different phases of sensemaking that can be developed with students’ scientific uncertainty. This study especially attends to two types of scientific uncertainty—conceptual and epistemic uncertainties. Conceptual uncertainty refers to student struggle of using conceptual understanding (e.g., mastery of content and everyday knowledge) to respond to an encountered phenomenon. Epistemic uncertainty emerges from struggles in using epistemic understanding to generate new ideas. Based on the multiple case study method, we examined sensemaking activities in two Korean science classrooms and one American science classroom and identified three phases of sensemaking: (a) focusing on a driving question related to a target phenomenon, (b) delving into multiple resources to develop plausible explanation(s), and (c) examining the successfulness of the new understanding and concretizing it. Based on the findings, we discuss two emerging themes. First, sensemaking progresses through three distinctive phases driven by students’ dynamically evolving scientific uncertainty. Second, attending to both epistemic and conceptual uncertainties can support developing sensemaking coherent with students’ view.
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Engaging children in argumentation‐focused discussions is essential to helping them collaboratively make sense of scientific phenomena. To support this effort, teachers must listen and be responsive to students' ideas to move the discussion forward with the goal of reaching consensus. Given the complexity of this ambitious science teaching practice, in lieu of traditional field experiences, online simulated teaching experiences provide opportunities for preservice teachers to practice implementing these strategies in a low‐risk, high‐support environment. Limited research has explored elementary preservice teachers' responsiveness while navigating an argumentation‐focused discussion, particularly in an online simulated teaching experience. The purpose of this study was to examine preservice teachers' responsiveness to students' ideas while eliciting students' initial constructed arguments and encouraging argument critique in two online simulated teaching experiences. Findings showed that preservice teachers' responsiveness to students' ideas was high in both online simulated teaching experiences when asking students to share evidence as well as engage in critique. However, their responsiveness varied when prompting for reasoning and was often low when eliciting students' claims. These findings provide empirical evidence that such online simulated teaching experiences can be used as productive spaces for PSTs to practice being responsive to students' ideas during argumentation‐focused discussions.
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There is strong agreement in science teacher education of the importance of teachers' content knowledge for teaching (CKT), which includes their subject matter knowledge and their pedagogical content knowledge. However, there are limited instruments that can be easily administered and scored on a large scale to assess and study elementary science teachers' CKT. Such measures would support strategic monitoring of large groups of science teachers' CKT and the investigation of comparative questions about science teachers' CKT longitudinally across the professional continuum or across teacher education or professional development sites. To address this gap, this study focused on designing an automatically scorable summative assessment that can be used to measure preservice elementary teachers' (PSETs') CKT in one high‐leverage science content area: matter and its interactions. We conducted a field test of this CKT instrument with 822 PSETs from across the United States and used the response data to examine how this instrument functions as a potential tool for measuring PSETs' CKT in this science content area. Results suggest this instrument is reliable and can be used on large scale to support valid inferences about PSETs' CKT in this content area. In addition, the dimensionality analysis showed that all items measure a single construct of CKT about matter and its interactions, as participants did not show any differential performance by content topic or work of teaching science instructional tool categories. Implications for progressing the field's understanding of the nature of CKT and approaches to developing summative instruments to assess science teachers' CKT are discussed.
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This study investigated how preservice elementary teachers' (PSTs) noticed the discourse practices they used to position students and their scientific thinking as they engaged a group of student avatars in argumentation-based simulated discussions. Using qualitative methods, 82 teaching reflections from 28 PSTs were analyzed. Findings indicate that in most reflections (66%), the PSTs were able to support co-construction of knowledge in the Mursion ® simulations. A further 28% of the reflections indicated that one student was positioned as a “knower,” suggesting the beginning of power shifts within the classroom discussions. In just 6% of the reflections, the teacher was the person responsible for constructing knowledge. These findings suggest that simulations may provide PSTs with opportunities to practice positioning students as capable of explaining and questioning one another's ideas, and to develop teachers' skills to notice the discourse practices they use to build collective consensus in argumentation-based discussions.
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Background Despite the prevalence and potential of K–12 engineering outreach programs, the moment‐to‐moment dynamics of outreach educators' facilitation of engineering learning experiences are understudied. There is a need to identify outreach educators' teaching moves and to explore the implications of these moves. Purpose/Hypothesis We offer a preliminary framework for characterizing engineering outreach educators' teaching moves in relation to principles of ambitious instruction. This study describes outreach educators' teaching moves and identifies learning opportunities afforded by these moves. Design/Method Through discourse analysis of video recordings of a university‐led engineering outreach program, we identified teaching moves of novice engineering outreach educators in interaction with elementary student design teams. We considered 18 outreach educators' teaching moves through a lens of ambitious instruction. Results In small group interactions, outreach educators used ambitious, conservative, and inclusive teaching moves. These novice educators utilized talk moves that centered students' ideas and agency. Ambitious moves included two novel teaching moves: design check‐ins and revoicing tangible manifestations of students' ideas. Ambitious moves offered students opportunities to engage in engineering design. Conservative moves provided opportunities for students to make technical and affective progress, and to experience engineering norms. Conclusions Our work is formative in describing engineering outreach educators' teaching moves and points to outreach educators' capability in using ambitious moves. Ambitious engineering instruction may be a useful framework for designing engineering outreach to support students' participation and progress in engineering design. Additionally, conservative teaching moves, typically considered constraining, may support productive student affect and engagement in engineering design.
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Background We investigate the factors that shape teachers’ implementation of a school STEM reform—the creation of a high-school makerspace. Educational reformers have increasing interest in making and makerspaces in schools. Prior research shows how factors shape reform at the classroom, school (organizational), and institutional levels, as well as across levels. However, most research on teachers tends to focus on classroom-level effects, which may not capture the full complexity of how they navigate multilevel reforms. We consider teachers’ decision-making from an ecological perspective to investigate what shapes their implementation efforts, using observational and interview data collected over 2 years in a large comprehensive high school. Results We find teachers’ efforts are shaped by four “distances”—or spaces teachers traversed, physically and conceptually—related to skillsets and distributed expertise, physical space, disciplinary learning, and structural factors. The distances operate as a constellation of factors—independently identifiable, co-operatively manifesting—to shape implementation. We position teacher deliberations and decision-making as portals into the forms of organizational and institutional supports offered in multilevel reforms. Conclusions The paper contributes insights into makerspace implementation in schools, adding to the emerging literature on how making can transform STEM learning experiences for students. We conclude that teachers’ decision-making around multilevel implementations can inform our understanding of how makerspaces are implemented and their impact on students’ experiences, as well as how seeing teachers as multilevel actors can offer new insights into reform dynamics writ large. We offer implications for makerspaces in schools, as well as methodological and theoretical considerations for how organizations and institutions can better support teachers as agents of STEM reform.
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This study aimed to examine what kind of epistemic and conceptual resources are enacted for productive engagement in the modeling activity that includes empirical investigations of ecosystems. We designed and implemented a knowledge construction activity, including field investigations on the school ecosystem. Recordings and transcripts of students' practices in the activity were used as the main data for a qualitative analysis. In this analysis process, by referring to prior literature on ecological research, we identified epistemic and conceptual resources that are valid in reflection to ecological research methods. Conceptual resources were identified in the aspects of natural, functional, and integrative concepts. These resources played a role of the essential knowledge for predicting how their knowledge claims would be unfolded in the fields and how they can generate data through empirical investigations on the fields. Epistemic resources were identified in the following aspects of the activity: The nature of knowledge, the process of knowledge construction, and the data source of knowledge construction. These resources were important for students to shape their activities that generated data for validating their knowledge claims of the ecosystem. The results of this study can contribute to the development of instructional strategies to support students' positioning as epistemic agents who can shape valid knowledge construction activities of the ecosystem.
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The way high school chemistry curricula are structured has the potential to convey consequential messages about knowledge and knowing to students and teachers. If a curriculum is built around practicing skills and recalling facts to reach “correct” answers, it is unlikely class activities will be seen (by students or the teacher) as opportunities to figure out causes for phenomena. Our team of teachers and researchers is working to understand how enactment of transformed curricular materials can support high school chemistry students in making sense of perplexing, relatable phenomena. Given this goal, we were surprised to see that co-developers who enacted our materials overwhelmingly emphasized the importance of acquiring true facts/skills when writing weekly reflections. Recognition that teachers’ expressed aims did not align with our stated goal of “supporting molecular-level sensemaking” led us to examine whether the tacit epistemological commitments reflected by our materials were, in fact, consistent with a course focused on figuring out phenomena. We described several aspects of each lesson in our two-semester curriculum including: the role of phenomena in lesson activities, the extent to which lessons were 3-dimensional, the role of student ideas in class dialogue, and who established coherence between lessons. Triangulation of these lesson features enabled us to infer messages about valued knowledge products and processes materials had the potential to send. We observed that our materials commonly encouraged students to mimic the structure of science practices for the purpose of being evaluated by the teacher. That is, students were asked to “go through the motions” of explaining, modeling etc. but had little agency regarding the sorts of models and explanations they found productive in their class community. This study serves to illustrate the importance of surfacing the tacit epistemological commitments that guide curriculum development. Additionally, it extends existing scholarship on epistemological messaging by considering curricular materials as a potentially consequential sources of messages.
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This study examines mathematics teachers’ noticing for equity. Noticing for equity is a critically important practice given research that documents how particular groups of students feel more or less empowered to take up ambitious mathematics practices. We conducted classroom observations and a series of noticing interviews with four secondary mathematics teachers nominated as exceptional equitable mathematics teachers. Using qualitative methods, we conducted a cross-case analysis to identify common instructional practices these teachers enacted to close participation gaps in their classrooms, as well as the associated ways of noticing during instruction. These findings document the intricate relationship between what teachers committed to equitable mathematics instruction attend to, how they reason about observed phenomena, and how they use this information to make instructional decisions.
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In this chapter, we argue that learning and teaching are fundamentally cultural processes (Cole, 1996; Lee, 2008; Lee, Spencer, & Harpalani, 2003; Nasir & Bang, 2012; Rogoff, 2003). The learning sciences have not yet adequately addressed the ways that culture is integral to learning. By culture, we mean the constellations of practices communities have historically developed and dynamically shaped in order to accomplish the purposes they value, including tools they use, social networks with which they are connected, ways they organize joint activity, and their ways of conceptualizing and engaging with the world. In this view, learning and development can be seen as the acquisition throughout the life course of diverse repertoires of overlapping, complementary, or even conflicting cultural practices. Diversity along multiple dimensions is a mainstay of human communities. National boundaries evolve and change, bringing together people from different groups that have different ethnicities, languages, worldviews, and cultural practices. Migration and transmigration are not new phenomena. However, technological advances have accelerated cross-national movement. In 2010, international migrants constituted 3.1 percent of the world population. The greatest concentrations of international migrants relative to the national populations are in the United States, Saudi Arabia, Canada, across Europe, and Oceania (largely New Zealand and Australia).
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The construct professional noticing of children's mathematical thinking is introduced as a way to begin to unpack the in-the-moment decision making that is foundational to the complex view of teaching endorsed in national reform documents. We define this expertise as a set of interrelated skills including (a) attending to children's strategies, (b) interpreting children's understandings, and (c) deciding how to respond on the basis of children's understandings. This construct was assessed in a cross-sectional study of 131 prospective and practicing teachers, differing in the amount of experience they had with children's mathematical thinking. The findings help to characterize what this expertise entails; provide snapshots of those with varied levels of expertise; and document that, given time, this expertise can be learned.
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The Next Generation Science Standards call for the adoption of many aspects of scientific inquiry in the classroom. The ways in which classroom talk and classroom environment change as students and teachers learn to utilize inquiry approaches are underexplored. This study examines the frequency with which linguistic markers related to access and power appear in student and teacher speech in the elementary science classroom. As teachers begin to implement argument-based inquiry methods, teacher and student use of these markers changes significantly. These changes indicate that students whose teachers utilize argument-based inquiry have greater access and power in the science classroom. In this paper, the mechanisms by which teachers afford their students access and power are explored from a quantitative perspective.
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This article suggests that productive disciplinary engagement can be fostered by designing learning environments that support (a) problematizing subject matter, (b) giving students authority to address such problems, (c) holding students accountable to others and to shared disciplinary norms, and (d) providing students with relevant resources. To provide empirical support for this suggestion, we use these 4 guiding principles to explain a case of productive disciplinary engagement from a Fostering Communities of Learners classroom. We use the principles to understand 1 group of students' emergent and sustained controversy over a species' classification. The students became passionately engaged, used evidence in scholarly ways, developed several arguments, and generated questions regarding biological classification. We propose the controversy as an example of productive disciplinary engagement, and show how it was supported by: the treatment of the classification as a legitimate problem by the students and teacher; the students having the authority to resolve the issue for themselves while being held accountable to relevant contributions from peers and outside sources as well as to classroom disciplinary norms for using evidence; and students having access to multiple sources of information, models of argumentation, and other relevant resources. The article closes by reflecting on the generality of the principles, showing how they can be used to understand 2 other cases of productive disciplinary engagement from the literature on reform programs in science and mathematics. By specifying differences as well as similarities in the ways the principles were embodied in these cases, the article may provide learning designers with a landscape of possibilities for promoting the specific kinds of productive disciplinary engagement that they most value.
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We set out to understand how different instantiations of inquiry emerged in two different years of one elementary teacher's classroom. Longitudinal observations from Mrs. Charles' 5th grade science classroom forced us to carefully and deliberately consider who exactly was responsible for the change in the class activities and norms. We provide empirical evidence to show how a focus on the teacher can easily overlook the complex dynamics of the classroom. The data reveal that students had a substantive and generative role in the class's arrival at the different instantiations of scientific inquiry—the nature and form of inquiry—that were constructed each year. We argue that, in an environment where a teacher carefully attends and responds to student thinking, the nascent resources students have for reasoning about phenomena can affect not only the conceptual ideas that emerge, but also influence what inquiry activities or practices become established as normative and productive over time. Our work with Mrs. Charles illuminates an important methodological concern with research on teacher development as well as the construct of teacher learning progressions; research accounts that focus primarily on the teacher may overlook the classroom norms that are negotiated between teacher and student, and thereby provide an incomplete portrayal of the teacher's activity within one classroom and the teacher's progress across multiple years. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 49: 429–464, 2012
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Recent calls for teacher preparation to become more grounded in practice prompt the questions: Which practices? and perhaps more fundamentally, what counts as a model of instruction worth learning for a new professional—i.e., the beginner's repertoire? In this report, we argue the following: If a defined set of subject-specific high-leverage practices could be articulated and taught during teacher preparation and induction, the broader teacher education community could collectively refine these practices as well as the tools and other resources that support their appropriation by novices across various learning-to-teach contexts. To anchor our conversation about these issues, we describe the evolution, in design, and enactment, of a “candidate core” and a suite of tools that supported the approximation of equitable and rigorous pedagogy for several groups of beginning science teachers. Their struggles and successes in taking up ambitious practice informed not only our designs for a beginner's repertoire but also a system of tools and socioprofessional routines that could foster such teaching over time. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 96:878–903, 2012
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Classroom teachers are finding the implementation of constructivist instruction far more difficult than the reform community acknowledges. This article presents a theoretical analysis of constructivism in practice by building a framework of dilemmas that explicates the conceptual, pedagogical, cultural, and political planes of the constructivist teaching experience. In this context, “constructivism in practice” is a concept situated in the ambiguities, tensions, and compromises that arise among stakeholders in the educational enterprise as constructivism is used as a basis for teaching. In addition to providing a unique theoretical perspective for researchers, the framework is a heuristic for teachers, providing critical questions that allow them to interrogate their own beliefs, question institutional routines, and understand more deeply the forces that influence their classroom practice
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In talk about teacher preparation and professional development, we often hear the word practice associated with what, how, or when the learning of teaching is supposed to happen. In this article, four different conceptions of practice are investigated, and their implications for how learning teaching might be organized are explored. Rather than a comprehensive review of the literature, what is presented here is a set of ideas that draw on both past and present efforts at reform. The purpose of this essay is to provoke clarification of what we mean when we talk about practice in relation to learning teaching. The author draws on her own research on the work of teaching from the perspective of practice to represent the nature of the work and to speculate from various perspectives on how that work might be learned.
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Exhilarated and exhausted, hopeful and cynical, fulfilled and dejected—these adjectives depict the emotional spectrum characterizing teachers' first year experiences. Narratives of teachers' initial years speak to the gritty reality of "really learning to teach." Their stories tell of the challenges experienced as they come to understand the depth and texture of their students' lives and their unique developmental needs. They work to develop humane, yet efficient, routines to manage the daily business of classroom and school life. They struggle to design engaging curriculum and to build knowledge of rigorous and fair standards for student work. They try to fend off fatigue, seeking to balance career demands with activities and connections that rejuvenate. They grapple with the absurdities and paradoxes of school bureaucracies, choosing when to critique and resist ill-framed policies and practices. They stumble in some interactions with
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There is a long, rich history of arguments for the importance of involving students in a process of inquiry. For many instructors, however, promoting student inquiry is a difficult agenda to pursue for two reasons. First, there is often tension for instructors between concerns for this agenda and more traditional concerns for the correctness and completeness of students' understanding. Second, it is not easy to recognize when productive student inquiry is taking place. For a teacher in class, what is valuable about the students' participation at any given moment may not be as obvious as what is flawed and ambiguous in their arguments. For this article, I analyze a short excerpt from a high school physics class discussion to consider the value of the students' work as inquiry and to illustrate a teacher's negotiation of the tension between inquiry and traditional content-oriented concerns. In this way, I try to discover the beginnings of science in what the students say and do, rather than to apply criteria from a particular model of scientific reasoning. This exploration for students' knowledge and abilities is offered both as an approach to research on student inquiry and as a mode of instructional practice to support that inquiry.
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In this study we examined the discourse components, interaction patterns, and reasoning complexity of 4 groups of 12 Grade 8 students in 2 science classrooms as they constructed mental models of the nature of matter, both on their own and with teacher guidance. Interactions within peer and teacher-guided small group discussions were videotaped and audiotaped, transcribed, and analyzed in a variety of ways. The key act of participants in both peer and teacher-guided groups was working with weak or incomplete ideas until they improved. How this was accomplished differed somewhat depending on the presence or absence of a teacher in the discussion. Teachers acted as a catalyst in discussions, prompting students to expand and clarify their thinking without providing direct information. Teacher-guided discussions were a more efficient means of attaining higher levels of reasoning and higher quality explanations, but peer discussions tended to be more generative and exploratory. Students' discourse was more varied within peer groups, and some peer groups attained higher levels of reasoning on their own. Ideas for using the results of these analyses to develop teachers' and students' collaborative scientific reasoning skills are presented.
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This study examines changes in teachers’ thinking as they participated in a video club designed to help them learn to notice and interpret students’ mathematical thinking. First, we investigate changes in teachers’ talk about classroom video segments before and after participation in the video club. Second, we identify three paths along which teachers learned to notice students’ mathematical thinking in this context: Direct, Cyclical, and Incremental. Finally, we explore ways the video club context influenced teacher learning. Understanding different forms of teacher learning provides insight for research on teacher cognition and may inform the design of video-based professional development.
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When evaluating equity, researchers often look at the “achievement gap.” Privileging knowledge and skills as primary outcomes of science education misses other, more subtle, but critical, outcomes indexing inequitable science education. In this comparative ethnography, we examined what it meant to “be scientific” in two fourth-grade classes taught by teachers similarly committed to reform-based science (RBS) practices in the service of equity. In both classrooms, students developed similar levels of scientific understanding and expressed positive attitudes about learning science. However, in one classroom, a group of African American and Latina girls expressed outright disaffiliation with promoted meanings of “smart science person” (“They are the science people. We aren't like them”), despite the fact that most of them knew the science equally well or, in one case, better than, their classmates. To make sense of these findings, we examine the normative practice of “sharing scientific ideas” in each classroom, a comparison that provided a robust account of the differently accessible meanings of scientific knowledge, scientific investigation, and scientific person in each setting. The findings illustrate that research with equity aims demands attention to culture (everyday classroom practices that promote particular meanings of “science”) and normative identities (culturally produced meanings of “science person” and the accessibility of those meanings). The study: (1) encourages researchers to question taken-for-granted assumptions and complexities of RBS and (2) demonstrates to practitioners that enacting what might look like RBS and producing students who know and can do science are but pieces of what it takes to achieve equitable science education. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., Inc. J Res Sci Teach 48: 459–485, 2011
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In this article, the authors argue for making practice the core of teachers' professional preparation. They set the argument for teaching practice against the contemporary backdrop of a teacher education curriculum that is often centered not on the tasks and activities of teaching but on beliefs and knowledge, on orientations and commitments, and a policy environment preoccupied with recruitment and retention. The authors caution that the bias against detailed professional training that often pervades common views of teaching as idiosyncratic and independently creative impedes the improvement of teachers' preparation for the work of teaching. They offer examples of what might be involved in teaching practice and conclude with a discussion of challenges of and resources for the enterprise.
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This paper deals with a theoretical mechanism for learning and a methodological approach for analyzing meaning making in classroom talk and action. It examines the potential of the approach for illuminating learning on a discursive level, i.e., how discourses change and how individuals become participants of new practices. Our approach involves a high-resolution analysis of how meaningful relations are built in encounters between individuals and between individuals and the world. The approach is based mainly on the work of the later Wittgenstein, but also on pragmatism and sociocultural research. To demonstrate how our approach can be used, we analyze what university students learn during a practical on insects. We specifically demonstrate how the encounters with physical pinned insects contribute to the meaning students make and how these encounters interact with other experiences during laboratory work. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed86:601–623, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/sce.10036
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There are many ways to understand the gap in science learning and achievement separating low-income, ethnic minority and linguistic minority children from more economically privileged students. In this article we offer our perspective. First, we discuss in broad strokes how the relationship between everyday and scientific knowledge and ways of knowing has been conceptualized in the field of science education research. We consider two dominant perspectives on this question, one which views the relationship as fundamentally discontinuous and the other which views it as fundamentally continuous. We locate our own work within the latter tradition and propose a framework for understanding the everyday se