Characteristics and Difficulties of Teachers Who Mentor Environmental Inquiry Projects

Abstract

The paper describes characteristics and analyses difficulties of environmental sciences teachers in mentoring their students in an extended inquiry project, which is a mandatory requirement of the environmental sciences matriculation in Israel. The teachers participated in a professional development program that provided both content knowledge and support for conducting inquiry, and enabled the teachers to guide the students in the inquiry project. Teachers who had experience in inquiry identified more skills required for mentoring students' inquiry, and provided a non-directive guidance pattern, whereas inexperienced teachers acknowledged less skills, and tended to present a directive-authoritative approach. Insufficient content and pedagogical content knowledge affected the teachers who closely controlled their students' work.

Teachers’ Perceived Requirements for Collaborating with the Surrounding World

“…Personal courage is by far perceived as the single most significant factor within this category. It is perceived to take courage to be able to let go of control, which is in coherence with previous studies where teachers express fears of what might happen when including CSS (Aikenhead, 2004;Bencze & Hodson, 1999;Braund & Reiss, 2006;Crawford, 1999;Fishman et al, 2003;Tal & Argaman, 2005). Dare to let go of the control.…”

“…Bungum (2003) adds struggles with the timetable to the list of teachers' perceived barriers. Teachers' concern regarding lack of control over the entire content knowledge is clearly expressed in studies on projects involving interdisciplinary (Tal & Argaman, 2005) as well as inquiry-based learning (Crawford, 1999;Fishman, Marx, Best & Tal, 2003).…”

Trends in research on project-based science and technology teaching and learning at K–12 levels: a systematic review

“…In 33 articles (for example, [1,4,5,11,12,19,29,[43][44][45]), the authors provided a definition of PBSTL, 6 either in a clearly identified section (25 articles) or indirectly throughout the text (8 articles). In 15 texts, the authors did not provide a definition for this approach (for example, [6][7][8][9]14,15,18,39]).…”

“…It is a question of the students being involved in the S&T processes used to solve the problem or answer the central question: scientific inquiry ( [19,26,38,43]); investigation ( [1,4,19,25,29,31,32,43,44]); and engineering design ( [25,29] The authors typically prefer the latter type of inquiry for PBSTL.…”

“…In 15 articles, the authors mention this feature and emphasise the possibilities that ICT, for example, affords to students with regard to (a) accessing information, (b) being involved in the learning in general and in the inquiry process in particular, or even (c) finding and communicating solutions and creating artefacts (for example, [1,4,12,13,19,37,44,46,47]). According to the authors, these tools 'provide opportunities for students to visualise and explore phenomena that would not otherwise be possible in classrooms through manipulating multiple dynamic representations' ([38], p. 672).…”