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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.
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Navigating experiential learning: The role of teacher discourse moves in amplifying student expertise
Experiential learning represents a shift in K-12 education that requires teachers to change the ways that they engage students. We created a professional development experience in which teachers learned about the entrepreneurial-based design challenges we developed (Authors, 2019) and practiced implementing teacher check-ins with students participating in our summer camp. In this paper, we conduct a case study to explore how three teachers used teacher discourse moves during their teacher check-ins. We found three types of teacher-student interactions: (a) positioning students as experts, (b) co-designing with students, and (c) pushing students towards an outcome. These findings suggest that teacher professional development for experiential learning should intentionally support teachers in learning how to employ the moves during teacher check-ins in ways that elevate student expertise and advance their thinking.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2048332
- PAR ID:
- 10600389
- Editor(s):
- Kosko, K W; Caniglia, J; Courtney, S A; Zolfaghari, M; Morris, G A
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of the forty-sixth annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 978-1-7348057-3-4
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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