Developing interpretive power in science teaching

Abstract

Early career teachers rarely receive sustained support for addressing issues of diversity and equity in their science teaching. This paper reports on design research to create a 30 hour professional development seminar focused on cultivating the interpretive power of early career teachers who teach science to students from historically non-dominant communities. Interpretive power refers to teachers' attunement to (a) students' diverse sense-making repertoires as intellectually generative in science and (b) expansive pedagogical practices that encourage, make visible, and intentionally build on students' ideas, experiences, and perspectives on scientific phenomena. The seminar sought to integrate student sense-making, scientific subject matter, teaching practice, and matters of equity and diversity on the same plane of professional inquiry by engaging participants in: (a) learning plant science; (b) analyzing classroom cases; (c) experimenting with expansive discourse practices in their classrooms; and (d) analyzing their classroom experiments in relation to student sense-making and expansive pedagogy. Twenty-eight teachers participated in two cycles of design research. An interview-based transcript analysis task captured shifts in teachers' interpretive power through their participation in the seminar. Findings showed that the teachers developed greater attunement to: complexity in students' scientific ideas; the intellectual generativity of students' sense-making; student talk as evidence of in-process, emergent thinking; and co-construction of meaning in classroom discussions. Findings also showed that participants developed deeper understanding of the functions of expansive teaching practices in fostering student sense-making in science and greater commitment to engaging in expansive practices in their classroom science discussions. # 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach XX:XX-XX, 2015.

Characterizing teacher attention to student thinking: A role for epistemological messages

“…Broadly speaking, I support inferences about epistemological messages by drawing on extended, fine-grained, casestudy analyses conducted by other researchers interested in teacher attention and student epistemologies (e.g., Rosebery et al, 2016;Stroupe, 2014). For example, Rosenberg et al (2006) describe how teacher attention shifted students from a mode in which students built knowledge by accumulating facts (question a) into an ordered list (question b) to a mode in which they imagined (question a) a causal story (question b).…”

“…. publically valued by teachers' responses" (Rosebery et al, 2016). Berland and Hammer (2010), following Bateson (1972), refer to this phenomenon as sending meta-communicative messages.…”

“…Windschitl and coworkers (Thompson, Windschitl, & Braaten, 2013;Windschitl et al, 2011) describe how the lowest-level teachers check "to see if students 'get it'" while in the highest-level teachers "elicit and use students' current conceptions of science ideas to reshape the direction of classroom conversations" (Windschitl et al, 2011(Windschitl et al, , p. 1357. Others distinguish between levels of teacher attention in which the lowest level involves merely stating or describing an idea and the highest level involves some synthesis or explanation (Rosebery, Warren, & Tucker-Raymond, 2016;Santagata & Angelici, 2010;Sherin & Han, 2004;Tekkumru Kisa & Stein, 2015;Talanquer, Bolger, & Tomanek, 2015;Walkoe, 2015). Notice that in each of these schemes, levels are defined in a domain-independent way.…”

Truth, success, and faith: Novice teachers’ perceptions of what's at risk in responsive teaching in science

“…In this spirit, responsive instruction foregrounds the substance of students’ ideas (Ball, 1993; Brodie, 2011; Coffey, Hammer, Levin, & Grant, 2011; Duckworth, 2001; Hammer, 1997; Hammer et al, 2012; Jacobs, Lamb, & Philipp, 2010; Levin et al, 2009; Rosebery, Warren, & Tucker‐Raymond, 2015; Sherin et al, 2011; Windschitl, Thompson, Braaten, & Stroupe, 2012). Teachers attend to the meaning that students are making of their disciplinary experiences and seek to understand these ideas rather than reflexively evaluate them.…”

Tracking a learner's verbal participation in science over time: Analysis of talk features within a social context

“…We find the idea of interpretive power (Rosebery, Warren, & Tucker-Raymond, 2016) useful. Rosebery, Warren, and Tucker-Raymond defined teachers' interpretive power as attunement to students' diverse sensemaking repertoires and expansive pedagogical practices.…”