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Research on students’ engagement suggests that epistemic affect--that is, the feelings and emotions experienced in the epistemic work of making sense of phenomena-- should be recognized as a central component of meaningful disciplinary engagement in science. These feelings and emotions are not tangential by-products, but are essential components of disciplinary engagement. Yet, there is still much to understand about how educators can attend and respond to students’ emotions in ways that support disciplinary engagement in science. To inform these efforts, we follow one high school Biology teacher, Amelia, to answer the following question: How does Amelia attend to and support her students’ emotions in ways that support their disciplinary engagement? Data examined include teacher interviews and classroom recordings of two multi-day science lessons. We found that the teacher worked to support her students’ emotions in moments of uncertainty in at least two ways: (1) by attending to these emotions directly, and (2) by sharing her personal experiences and feelings in engaging in similar activities as a science learner. We describe how Amelia made herself vulnerable to students, describing her own struggles in making sense of phenomena, in turn supporting her students to normalize these experiences as part of doing science. 

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. 

Current understandings of science learning revolve around students’ developing the ability to use science concepts and practices to “figure out” aspects of the natural world. One emerging area of focus in this new vision of learning is the emotional work required in students’ participation science sense making. This research focuses on how one teacher supports student reframing of moments of epistemic vexation. After reviewing classroom video, and interviews, three themes emerged: (1) Productive meta-affect is more likely to occur when students understand why the teacher allows for failure to connect ideas or understand scientific concepts, (2) Without explicit attention from the teacher during moments of epistemic vexation, students can disengage from sense-making and (3) When the teacher does not adequately attend to students’ epistemic vexation, students can build solidarity and reach out to each other for emotional support in developing meta-affect. 

Researchers of teacher education have long advocated that one of the most essential supports to teacher learning of novel instruction practices comes from collaboration. Much of the collaboration literature focuses on the outcomes of teacher collaboration without providing insight into the nature of collaborations. In this work, we seek to understand the collaboration that occurred between five school biology teachers as they designed, enacted, and reflected on a lesson emerging from professional development focused on productive talk. The questions guiding this work include: What was the focus of the LCD teacher group’s collaboration?, What was the nature of the LCD teacher group’s collaboration? and, What role did the group’s collaboration serve in supporting each teacher’s practice? We found that the collaborative space opened-up opportunities for teachers to discuss their practice for the lesson and outside of the lesson itself. Salient to the collaborative space was a sense of support between the teachers as teachers intensively listened to one another, normalized a problematic issue as well as the emotions that they were experiencing by relating to each other, providing advice and words of encouragement. Teachers’ collaboration eased the work of designing and enacting a conceptually challenging lesson. 

Reflection allows teachers to evaluate their past instruction and make decisions to guide their future practice (i.e., Killion & Todnem, 1991; Moore-Russo & Wilsey, 2014). The literature on teacher sensemaking suggests that engaging in reflection might support sensemaking about changes to teachers’ practice (e.g., Marco-Bujosa et al., 2017; Senzen-Barrie et al., 2020). However, prior research has not connected teachers’ engagement in reflection to their sensemaking. By using video data of PD, we analyzed the category of reflection (Moore-Russo & Wilsey, 2014) teachers participated in, the process of sensemaking (Robertson & Richards, 2017), as well as what teachers were sensemaking about in relation to the PD’s design. Our analysis indicated that teachers typically reflected by sharing their individual viewpoints and used the process of negotiation to consider how to facilitate productive talk. Additionally, different features designed as a part of the PD (i.e., general discussion, redesign, video) supported teachers to participate in different types of reflection and processes of sensemaking. The findings from this study have implications for teacher PD design features and their role in facilitating reflection and promoting sensemaking. 

Reform-based instruction that fosters all students’ intellectual engagement and sensemaking is possible. However, it is not yet prevalent across many science classrooms. To gain more insight into how to design and enact science instruction supporting students’ intellectual engagement, this investigation centered on understanding how to design and implement science lessons for promoting students’ intellectual engagement as epistemic agents who shape knowledge building happening in the classroom. We examined a middle school science teacher's design and implementation of four lessons that she did as part of a PD focused on fostering productive science talk in science classrooms. Our analysis revealed that her efforts in fostering opportunities for students’ epistemic agency were evident in both her lesson design and implementation. Her responsiveness to students’ thinking/intellectual engagement throughout the lesson implementations via principled improvisations supported opportunities for students’ epistemic agency. Her efforts allow us to understand how the design and implementation of science lessons with the focus of opening space and maintaining this space by being responsive to students’ thinking are critical for fostering students’ epistemic agency. These findings can provide implications for professional development efforts that seek to develop teachers’ capacity for reform-based instruction in science classrooms. 

A teacher’s noticing or their ability to see and interpret classroom events is an important component of their expertise. Examination of these noticings is a way to understand changes in their learning over time. In this research, we examine changes in teacher noticing of classroom instruction for two groups that participated in slightly different professional development experiences to understand how this PD shaped their personal domain of learning. Findings suggest that both programs shaped teacher noticing and learning but in different ways. 

This research employs the lenses of epistemological resources and framing to examine the complexities of one teacher’s efforts to position his middle-school biology students as sensemakers. Through interviews, classroom observations, and document analysis, we trace the teacher’s activation of varied epistemological resources and how such resources positioned students’ efforts throughout the lesson. While the launch of tasks was framed as an opportunity for “doing science,” this framing became less stable when the teacher engaged with students in small group work and during the wrap up that were focused on the “right answer.” Specific phases of the lesson served as a context that influenced the epistemological resources activated, helping us understand the varied, dynamic, and sometimes contradictory nature of the teacher’s moves and their consequences on students’ framing of their efforts. 

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.