Classroom teachers are finding the implementation of constructivist instruction far more difficult than the reform community acknowledges. This article presents a theoretical analysis of constructivism in practice by building a framework of dilemmas that explicates the conceptual, pedagogical, cultural, and political planes of the constructivist teaching experience. In this context, “constructivism in practice” is a concept situated in the ambiguities, tensions, and compromises that arise among stakeholders in the educational enterprise as constructivism is used as a basis for teaching. In addition to providing a unique theoretical perspective for researchers, the framework is a heuristic for teachers, providing critical questions that allow them to interrogate their own beliefs, question institutional routines, and understand more deeply the forces that influence their classroom practice

ABSTRACT:One hundred years after its conception, the scientific method continues to reinforce a kind of cultural lore about what it means to participate in inquiry. As commonly implemented in venues ranging from middle school classrooms to undergraduate laboratories, it emphasizes the testing of predictions rather than ideas, focuses learners on material activity at the expense of deep subject matter understanding, and lacks epistemic framing relevant to the discipline. While critiques of the scientific method are not new, its cumulative effects on learners' conceptions of science have not been clearly articulated. We discuss these effects using findings from a series of five studies with degree-holding graduates of our educational system who were preparing to enter the teaching profession and apprentice their own young learners into unproblematic images of how science is done. We then offer an alternative vision for investigative science-model-based inquiry (MBI)-as a system of activity and discourse that engages learners more deeply with content and embodies five epistemic characteristics of scientific knowledge: that ideas represented in the form of models are testable, revisable, explanatory, conjectural, and generative. We represent MBI as an interconnected set of classroom conversations and provide examples of its implementation and its limitations.

Recent calls for teacher preparation to become more grounded in practice prompt the questions: Which practices? and perhaps more fundamentally, what counts as a model of instruction worth learning for a new professional—i.e., the beginner's repertoire? In this report, we argue the following: If a defined set of subject‐specific high‐leverage practices could be articulated and taught during teacher preparation and induction, the broader teacher education community could collectively refine these practices as well as the tools and other resources that support their appropriation by novices across various learning‐to‐teach contexts. To anchor our conversation about these issues, we describe the evolution, in design, and enactment, of a “candidate core” and a suite of tools that supported the approximation of equitable and rigorous pedagogy for several groups of beginning science teachers. Their struggles and successes in taking up ambitious practice informed not only our designs for a beginner's repertoire but also a system of tools and socioprofessional routines that could foster such teaching over time. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 96:878–903, 2012

Science education reform documents emphasize the importance of inquiry experiences for young learners. This means that teachers must be prepared with the knowledge, skills, and habits of thinking to mentor their students through authentic investigations. This study examines how preservice teachers' inquiry experiences, in a science methods course, influenced and were influenced by their conceptions of inquiry. The study also assesses how these experiences were associated with eventual classroom practice. Six preservice secondary teachers were observed during a 2-month inquiry project and then followed into the classroom as they began a 9-week teaching practicum. Data revealed that participants' preproject conceptions of the inquiry process were related to the conduct and interpretation of their own inquiry project, and that the project experience modified the inquiry conceptions of those participants who already had sophisticated understandings of scientific investigations. Perhaps most importantly, the participants who eventually used guided and open inquiry during their student teaching were not those who had more authentic views of inquiry or reflected most deeply about their own inquiry projects, but rather they were individuals who had significant undergraduate or professional experiences with authentic science research. Finally, this article advocates that independent science investigations be part of preservice education and that these experiences should be scaffolded to prompt reflection specifically about the nature of inquiry and conceptually linked to ways in which inquiry can be brought into the K-12 classroom.

Scientific explanation plays a central role in science education reform documents, including the Benchmarks for Science Literacy, the National Science Education Standards, and the recent research report, Taking Science to School. While scientific explanation receives significant emphases in these documents, there is little discussion or consensus within the science education community about the nature of explanation itself. However, debates about scientific explanation have been a mainstay for philosophers of science for decades. We argue that a more clearly articulated conceptualization of scientific explanation for science education is necessary for making the vision of science education reform a reality. In this essay, we use major philosophical theories of scientific explanation as lenses to examine how the science education community has constructed the idea of explanation. We also examine instructional practice in school science settings, including our own classrooms, where teachers and students are working to explain natural phenomena. Using these examples, we offer suggestions for preparing both educators and young learners to engage in explanatory discourses that are reasonably accountable to authentic epistemic practice in science. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 95:639–669, 2011

Research on ubiquitous computing in schools has documented that teachers often change instructional practices over time when using technology with students and has further suggested that teachers’ use of technology may play a role in their shifting toward more constructivist pedagogy. Our two-year study takes an ethnographic perspective in examining how three middle school teachers learned to use technology in the context of a laptop computer program. The ways in which those teachers eventually integrated computers into classroom instruction were powerfully mediated by their interrelated belief systems about learners in their school, about what constituted “good teaching” in the context of the institutional culture, and about the role of technology in students’ lives. The condition of ubiquitous technology did not initiate teachers’ movement toward constructivist instruction. Rather, the laptops were a catalyst that enabled one participant, who had a pre-existing dissatisfaction with teacher-centered practices, to transform her classroom through collaborative student work and project-based learning.

Current theories of novice teacher learning have not accounted for the varied influences of pedagogical training, subject matter knowledge, tools, identity, and institutional context(s) on the development of classroom practice. We examined how 26 beginning secondary science teachers developed instructional repertoires as they participated in two types of communities, one infused with discourses and tools supportive of ambitious teaching and another that reinforced traditional practices. We found three trajectories of practice—each with distinctive signatures for how novices engaged students intellectually. Differences were explained by: the communities with which teachers most closely identified, the degree to which teachers’ discourses about student thinking were developed within these communities, and how teachers used tools from the communities to shape their practice.

Despite the ubiquity of the term ''inquiry'' in science education literature, little is known about how teachers conceptualize inquiry, how these conceptions are formed and reinforced, how they relate to work done by scientists, and if these ideas about inquiry are translated into classroom practice. This is a multicase study in which 14 preservice secondary science teachers developed their own empirical investigations-from formulating questions to defending results in front of peers. Findings indicate that participants shared a tacit framework of what it means to ''do science'' which shaped their investigations and influenced reflections on their inquiries. Some facets of the participants' shared model were congruent with authentic inquiry; however, the most consistent assumptions were misrepresentations of fundamental aspects of science: for example, that a hypothesis functions as a guess about an outcome, but is not necessarily part of a larger explanatory system; that background knowledge may be used to provide ideas about what to study, but this knowledge is not in the form of a theory or other model; and that theory is an optional tool one might use at the end of a study to help explain results. These ideas appear consistent with a ''folk theory'' of doing science that is promoted subtly, but pervasively, in textbooks, through the media, and by members of the science education community themselves. Finally, although all participants held degrees in science, the participants who eventually used inquiry in their own classrooms were those who had significant research experiences in careers or postsecondary study and greater science-content background. ß