An official website of the United States government
To support students’ learning, a wide body of research and instructional reforms emphasize students’ engagement in productive talk with rigorous thinking in science classrooms. However, despite efforts, productive science talk is not yet prevalent in many classrooms. To gain more insight into the generation of productive talk in science classrooms, we explored a group of science teachers’ instructional vision and practices with respect to promoting classroom discourse. Our analysis revealed variations in teachers’ instructional visions and quality of instruction in their classrooms. In most cases, there was an alignment between teachers’ instructional vision and practices. We observed high quality instruction in terms of facilitating productive discussions and rigorous students’ thinking in the classroom of teachers with sophisticated instructional vision. Low instructional quality is observed in the classrooms of teachers with less articulate instructional vision of productive classroom discussion. We contend that exploring science teachers’ instructional vision and their instructional practices together can provide a powerful lens to identify the areas of improvement for promoting high-quality instruction in many science classrooms. Moreover, working towards the development of a shared vision of instruction by stakeholders and teachers can support enactment of high-quality science instruction.
more »
« less
Rigorous science instruction: Understanding differences seen in teachers’ instructional quality through their instructional vision
This work follows a group of four science teachers in the second year of an intensive PD. Our analyses revealed two distinct variations in their instruction. These differences were accompanied by similar differences in their instructional vision. We argue that instructional vision can illuminate teachers’ thinking about their work, insights that may be useful in helping PD facilitators better hone such experiences.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1720587
- PAR ID:
- 10422117
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
This study investigated how Chicago Public Schools (CPS) computer science (CS) teachers and instructional coaches navigated remote professional development (PD) during the pandemic. Analyzing multiple sources of qualitative data, we explored how coaches adapted PD to address teachers’ unique needs and how teachers experienced remote PD. We found that the coaching team designed PD to help teachers translate key instructional strategies into the remote learning environment and increasingly centered their PD design efforts on improving teacher engagement and wellbeing. Teachers primarily valued the relational aspects of PD, including opportunities for collaboration and personalized support from instructional coaches. Leveraging an ecological framework, we found that the pandemic and remote learning contexts amplified preexisting PD challenges experienced by teachers and coaches. Findings suggest that PD researchers and designers should focus on teacher wellbeing and that districts should invest in flexible and adaptable PD structures to meet CS teachers’ varied needs.more » « less
-
Instructional shifts required by equitable, reform‐based science instruction are challenging, especially in the elementary context. Such shifts require professional development (PD) that supports teacher internalization of new pedagogical strategies as well as changes in beliefs about how students learn. Because of this complexity, many PD programs struggle to foster lasting pedagogical shifts, necessitating further investigation into why some teachers successfully embrace reform practices while others do not. This qualitative study uses a nonlinear, iterative model of teacher learning (Interconnected Model of Professional Growth; Clarke & Hollingsworth, 2002) alongside professional noticing to help understand why elementary teachers in science PD differentially make sense of and internalize new pedagogies. Findings indicate that teachers most likely to adopt reform‐based instructional practices from the PD were those who clearly connected student learning to their instructional moves. In addition, teachers who more actively attended to student sensemaking and productive struggle took up pedagogies from the PD more substantively than did colleagues who attended solely to student engagement and affect. Finally, teachers who attended to and valued novel ideas from students’ lived experiences were more likely to change their beliefs about students’ capacity to learn science, and thus more likely to see the value of instructional practices from the PD. In sum, structuring PD to build on these specific teacher noticing skills can encourage more teachers to move away from traditional, teacher‐directed instructional practice, and more fully support reform‐based instructional practices.more » « less
-
Elementary schools provide a natural entry point to computer science (CS) education, yet elementary teachers spend most of their instructional time in literacy and math. One way to bring CS in elementary schools is through integrated approaches. In this work we present a professional development (PD) program that helps elementary teachers integrate CS with content and culturally relevant pedagogy to create accessible CS instruction. Qualitative data were collected from five teachers who attended the year-long program. Findings indicate that all teachers fully integrated CS with content and culturally-relevant pedagogy; however, such integration focused mostly on literacy and closely paralleled what was presented in PD. Implications are drawn regarding the design of PD programs that help teachers integrate CS in elementary classrooms.more » « less
-
Using the IQA-SOR instrument, we analyzed participating teachers' classroom implementation of instructional resources and models. Teachers who collaboratively designed their materials for the focal lessons demonstrated more rigorous implementation, while those who only experienced the focal lessons during the PD experience did not implement as rich of instruction. However, all participating teachers did show strengths in implementing particular aspects of the focal lessons.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
