An official website of the United States government
Reform efforts in science and mathematics education highlight students’ experiences and sensemaking repertoires as valuable resources for instruction. Yet, there is much to learn about how to cultivate teachers’ capacity for eliciting, understanding, and responding to students’ contributions. We argue that the first step of this cultivation is teachers’ learning to listen: to attune and attend to the novel ways that students make sense of scientific phenomena and the natural world. While this notion of listening as critical to teaching is intuitive, the work behind it can be challenging. As such, this study explores promises and tensions of learning to listen through the journey of one pre-service teacher and examines her shifting views on teaching as related to her reflective practice around the work of listening. Focusing on listening as a core tenet of teaching, we discuss implications for teacher education to center listening as an instructional target for teacher learning in science and mathematics education.
more »
« less
Designing Classroom Space as an Extension of Pedagogical Judgment: A Case Study
For the past decade, learning scientists have come to understand the relationships between learning and space — usually outside of schools and classrooms. More recently, scholars in teaching and teacher education have called for research that considers how space and movement shape teaching and learning. In this paper, we integrate concepts and methods across the learning sciences and teacher education. We examine the relationship between classroom spatial design and the enactment of ambitious and equitable mathematics teaching. Specifically, we apply a case study approach to outline how an experienced teacher’s use of space reflects her pedagogical judgment. Findings and discussion outline six key ways this teacher considers space in her classroom design and her facilitation of classroom interactions. We suggest this study has implications for future efforts to characterize classroom spaces in ways that integrate ideas in the learning sciences and teacher education.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2100784
- PAR ID:
- 10512566
- Publisher / Repository:
- ISLS Annual Meeting 2023
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 282 to 289
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
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.more » « less
-
N/A (Ed.)Teachers can play critical roles in challenging or reinscribing dominant narratives about what counts as STEM, who is seen within STEM disciplines, and how these disciplines should be taught. However, teachers have often experienced STEM in limited ways in their own education and are thereby provided with few resources for re-imagining these disciplines. While teacher educators have designed learning environments that engage teachers in new forms of disciplinary activities, there have been few accounts that describe how teachers make connections between these experiences and dominant narratives that impact their own and their students’ learning. In this study, I report on the experiences of Alma, a white, working-class, female elementary teacher in an online graduate certificate program for K-12 engineering educators. Through her engagement in engineering design in the program, Alma appropriated—transformed and made her own—discourse of the engineering design process in ways that trouble some of the narratives that restrict her, her family, and her students in STEM and in school. Alma’s experiences emphasize the need to consider not just what teachers learn about disciplinary tools and discourses, but how they transform these for their own purposes and contexts.more » « less
-
Abstract This paper examines a professional learning (PL) context to understand what one teacher took up and learned and how this impacted her classroom instruction five years after participating in a specified professional learning (PL) program. Understanding teachers’ perceptions about specific design features of a program that they believe impacted their learning brings an important new voice to PL literature. Findings show that the teacher’s learning of targeted content and pedagogical strategies was consonant with the PL program’s goals and intentions. We highlight five assertions that connect PL design features to teacher learning in four categories - content, pedagogy, resources, and collaboration. Our study provides more granular evidence about the design elements of high-quality PL and contributes new understandings about the connections between PL design features and teacher uptake related to the following: aligned beliefs about teaching and learning, a knowledgeable facilitator, bounded routines, representations, and a community of learners to anchor learning from PL. This study shines light on the necessity of studying teacher learning from PL over time in an intentional and in-depth manner, as it takes time for teachers to incorporate new ideas into their teaching practice and make observable changes. More research is needed to continue the study of how and why PL design elements impact teachers’ experiences for corroboration and extending of assertions and theories about teacher professional learning.more » « less
-
This paper presents a case study of an elementary teacher, Holly, who participated in a federally funded summer professional development (PD) program aimed at integrating community-based engineering into elementary education. The study examines how Holly’s teaching practices and beliefs about teaching engineering contributed to the significant improvements in her students’ attitudes toward engineering and their perceptions of engineering as a potential career. Data were collected over three years through multiple methods, including post-PD interviews, lesson recordings, and a post-teaching interview. We analyzed classroom videos using a video analysis protocol. We used open coding to analyze the interviews. Once the analysis of the interviews and videos was completed, we engaged in a sense-making process to identify connections across data points (videos and interviews). Our findings showed that Holly extensively incorporated scientific inquiry into her lessons. This approach enabled students to develop their inquiry skills and facilitated a smooth transition to engineering design activities. By connecting class activities to the local context, students were able to see the relevance of engineering to their everyday lives and take ownership of their learning. This study emphasizes the potential of community-focused engineering to foster meaningful science and engineering practices in elementary education.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.22318/icls2023.180384
