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1. A Study of Teacher Sensemaking about Productive Student Talk in Science Classrooms

   Vande Zande, D. & (January 2021, National Association for Research in Science Teaching Annual Meeting 2021)

   null (Ed.)

   One way to support teachers' learning to facilitate the recent reform vision (NRC, 2012) in their classrooms is through professional development (PD). We explored a biology teacher’s (Monica) sensemaking during the PD that focused on facilitating productive science classroom discourse to understand her responses to the PD in terms of teaching science by engaging students in productive talk in science classrooms. Using both video and interview data, we analyzed the process of her sensemaking about facilitating (productive) talk during the PD and the meaning she was making of productive talk. Our analysis indicated that Monica participated in sensemaking mostly about her students' participation in talk. Throughout the PD conversations, she rarely focused on what she could do (or could have done) to facilitate student talk without the PD facilitators' pressing. This is supported by our analysis of the interviews with Monica, which showed that the sense that she was making about productive talk mostly focuses on students' contributions to the talk and their accountability to reasoning, scientific knowledge, and sensemaking. These findings provide implications for facilitating teachers’ sensemaking around new instructional practices and reforms within PD contexts. 

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2. Teacher Self-efficacy During Professional Development for Game Design and Unity

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3478432.3499039  

   Hodges, Charles B.; Akcaoglu, Mete; Allen, Andrew; Doğan, Selçuk (March 2022, Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education)

   Teacher self-efficacy (SE) has been observed to be an 'important construct for Computer Science (CS) teachers' professional development because it can predict both teaching behaviors as well as student outcomes" [1]. The purpose of the present study was to investigate teacher CS SE during a two-year federally funded professional development (PD) and curriculum development project for middle school teachers incorporating game-design and the Unity development platform. The research question investigated is: How does teacher self-efficacy for teaching computer science via game design with the Unity game development platform change during a year-long PD program? Investigations of teacher SE for teaching CS have resulted in some surprising results. For example, it has been reported that - There were no differences in self-efficacy based on teachers' overall level of experience, despite previous findings that teacher self-efficacy is related to amount of experience" and "no differences in self-efficacy related to the teachers' own level of experience with CS" [2], thus further study of CS teacher SE is warranted. Participants in this study were six middle school teachers from four middle schools in the southeastern United States. They participated in a year-long PD program learning the Unity game development platform, elements of game design, and foundations of learner motivation. Guided reflective journaling was used to track the teachers' SE during the first year of the project. Teachers completed journal prompts at four intervals. Prompts consisted of questions like "How do you currently feel about your ability to facilitate student learning with Unity?" and "Are you confident that you can implement the materials the way the project team has planned for them to be implemented?" Prior to beginning the project participants expressed confidence in being able to facilitate student learning after participating in the planned professional development, but there was some uneasiness about learning and using Unity. From a SE perspective their responses make sense, as all of the participants are experienced teachers and should have confidence in their general ability to teach. However, since Unity is a new programming environment for all of the teachers, they did not have the prior experience necessary to have a high degree of confidence that they could successfully use it with their students. 

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3. Evaluation of Engineering Problem-framing Professional Development for K-12 Science Teachers

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--34604  

   West, Meg E; Hylton, J Blake; Herak, Patrick J; Wellman, Bruce; France, Todd (June 2020, 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)

   As the importance to integrate engineering into K12 curricula grows so does the need to develop teachers’ engineering teaching capabilities and knowledge. One method that has been used to aid this development is engineering professional development programs. This evaluation paper presents the successes and challenges of an engineering professional development program for teachers focused around the use of engineering problem-framing design activities in high school science classrooms. These activities were designed to incorporate the cross-cutting ideas published in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and draw on best practices for instructional design of problem-framing activities from research on design and model-eliciting activities (MEAs). The professional development (PD) was designed to include the following researched-based effective PD key elements: (1) is content focused, (2) incorporates active learning, (3) supports collaboration, (4) uses models of effective practice, (5) provides coaching and expert support, (6) offers feedback and reflection, and (7) is of sustained duration. The engineering PD, including in-classroom deployment of activities and data collection, was designed as an iterative process to be conducted over a three-year period. This will allow for improvement and refinement of our approach. The first iteration, reported in this paper, consisted of seven high school science teachers who have agreed to participate in the PD, implement the problem-framing activities, and collect student data over a period of one year. The PD itself consisted of the teachers comparing science and engineering, participating in problem-framing training and activities, and developing a design challenge scenario for their own courses. The participating teachers completed a survey at the end of the PD that will be used to inform enhancement of the PD and our efforts to recruit additional participants in the following year. The qualitative survey consisted of open-ended questions asking for the most valuable takeaways from the PD, their reasoning for joining the PD, reasons they would or would not recommend the PD, and, in their opinion, what would inspire their colleagues to attend the PD. The responses to the survey along with observations from the team presenting the PD were analyzed to identify lessons learned and future steps for the following iteration of the PD. From the data, three themes emerged: Development of PD, Teacher Motivation, and Teacher Experience. 

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4. FIRST Principles to Design for Online, Synchronous High School CS Teacher Training and Curriculum Co-Design

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3428029.3428059  

   Grover, Shuchi; Cateté, Veronica; Barnes, Tiffany; Hill, Marnie; Ledeczi, Akos; Broll, Brian (January 2020, Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research)

   null (Ed.)

   The Covid-19 pandemic has offered new challenges and opportunities for teaching and research. It has forced constraints on in-person gathering of researchers, teachers, and students, and conversely, has also opened doors to creative instructional design. This paper describes a novel approach to designing an online, synchronous teacher professional development (PD) and curriculum co-design experience. It shares our work in bringing together high school teachers and researchers in four US states. The teachers participated in a 3-week summer PD on ideas of Distributed Computing and how to teach this advanced topic to high school students using NetsBlox, an extension of the Snap! block-based programming environment. The goal of the PD was to prepare teachers to engage in collaborative co-design of a 9-week curricular module for use in classrooms and schools. Between their own training and the co-design process, teachers co-taught a group of high school students enrolled in a remote summer internship at a university in North Carolina to pilot the learned units and leverage ideas from their teaching experience for subsequent curricular co-design. Formative and summative feedback from teachers suggest that this PD model was successful in meeting desired outcomes. Our generalizable FIRST principles—Flexibility, Innovativeness, Responsiveness (and Respect), Supports, and Teamwork (collaboration)—that helped make this unique PD successful, can help guide future CS teacher PD designs. 

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5. Exploring the personal/external domains: Investigating changes in epistemic orientations during sustained collaborative professional learning

   Morandi, S.; Schellinger, J.; Roberts, K.; Enderle, P.; Granger, E. M.; Southerland, S. A. (January 2023, National Association for Research in Science Teaching Annual Meeting 2023)

   Current reform efforts in science education focus on creating environments where students grapple with and negotiate their own understandings and mechanistic explanations of scientific phenomena by using their knowledge of disciplinary content and science practices. In order to support this reformed vision, effective professional development (PD) for science teachers is critical. If PD is to shape teachers’ practice, teachers must experience a change in attitudes and beliefs. The research presented here explores the epistemic orientation of three secondary science teacher cohorts who were supported in different iterations in a larger professional development study. The epistemic orientation toward teaching science survey was administered at three time points for each cohort and paired sample t-tests were performed to analyze composite and dimensional scores. Our analysis revealed that change in epistemic orientation occurred for teachers who engaged in two years of supportive PD, but that one year of support was not sufficient to engender change in epistemic orientations. These findings further support the need for continuous, high-quality, longitudinal PD when the goal is a shift in science teachers’ epistemological beliefs and teaching practices. 

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