This research paper describes a study of elementary teacher learning in an online graduate program in engineering education for in-service teachers. While the existing research on teachers in engineering focuses on their disciplinary understandings and beliefs (Hsu, Cardella, & Purzer, 2011; Martin, et al., 2015; Nadelson, et al., 2015; Van Haneghan, et al., 2015), there is increasing attention to teachers' pedagogy in engineering (Capobianco, Delisi, & Radloff, 2018). In our work, we study teachers' pedagogical sense-making and reflection, which, we argue, is critical for teaching engineering design.
This study takes place in [blinded] program, in which teachers take four graduate courses over fifteen months. The program was designed to help teachers not only learn engineering content, but also shift their thinking and practice to be more responsive to their students. Two courses focus on pedagogy, including what it means to learn engineering and instructional approaches to support this learning. These courses consist of four main elements, in which teachers:
1) Read data-rich engineering education articles to reflect on learning engineering; 2) Participate in online video clubs, looking at classroom videos of students’ engineering and commenting on what they notice; 3) Conduct interviews with learners about the mechanism of a pull-back car; and 4) Plan and teach engineering lessons, collecting and analyzing video from their classrooms.
In the context of this program, we ask: what stances do teachers take toward learning and teaching engineering design? What shifts do we observe in their stances?
We interviewed teachers at the start of the program and after each course. In addition to reflecting on their learning and teaching, teachers watched videos of students’ engineering and discussed what they saw as relevant for teaching engineering. We informally compared summaries from previous interviews to get a sense of changes in how participants talked about engineering, how they approached teaching engineering, and what they noticed in classroom videos. Through this process, we identified one teacher to focus on for this paper: Alma is a veteran 3rd-5th grade science teacher in a rural, racially-diverse public school in the southeastern region of the US. We then developed content logs of Alma's interviews and identified emergent themes. To refine these themes, we looked for confirming and disconfirming evidence in the interviews and in her coursework in the program. We coded each interview for these themes and developed analytic memos, highlighting where we saw variability and stability in her stances and comparing across interviews to describe shifts in Alma's reasoning. It was at this stage that we narrowed our focus to her stances toward the engineering design process (EDP).
In this paper, we describe and illustrate shifts we observed in Alma's reasoning, arguing that she exhibited dramatic shifts in her stances toward teaching and learning the EDP. At the start of the program, she was stable in treating the EDP as a series of linear steps that students and engineers progress through. After engaging and reflecting on her own engineering in the first course, she started to express a more fluid stance when talking more abstractly about the EDP but continued to take it up as a linear process in her classroom teaching. By the end of the program, Alma exhibited a growing stability across contexts in her stance toward the EDP as a fluid set of overlapping practices that students and engineers could engage in.
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Using technology in representing practice to support preservice teachers’ quality questioning: The roles of noticing in improving practice
Calls for a “practice-based” approach to teacher education have become common in scholarship on teacher education, and preservice-teaching (PST) mathematics programs are
increasingly heeding this call. Practice-based teacher education (PBTE) moves beyond standard approaches to teacher education in which PSTs learn about teaching in ways they
are then expected to apply in practice and toward an approach that provides PSTs opportunities to gain experience in particular core practices in ways that approximate enactment in the classroom. A growing body of research suggests that teachers’ responses, including the questions they ask, can help students’ develop content knowledge and proficiency in mathematics and science practices in the classroom. However, despite evidence that PSTs can notice students’ thinking in various activities in their preparation programs, it is not clear that they are sufficiently well-prepared to propose quality responses
before entering the classroom. In this paper, we describe two different approaches that we have taken to provide support for quality teacher questioning in the LessonSketch
environment. From our results, we develop a hypothesis that a pedagogical approach that primes novices to notice model questioning can support a stance of focusing on the substance of students’ thinking and probing rather than guiding students’ thinking in their proposed questions.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1712220
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10065776
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of technology and teacher education
- Volume:
- 26
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1059-7069
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 127-147
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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