Positioning participation in the NGSS era: What counts as success?

Abstract

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) strives to shift science learning from the teacher as a single cognitive agent, to a classroom community in which participants are working together in directing the classroom's communal knowledge to figure out questions about how phenomena occur, and building, testing, and refining their ideas to address those questions. To achieve this type of classroom environment, teachers should attend to students' knowledge and ideas and pay attention to how students are located within teacher‐led interactions, such as being positioned as active discussants or designated listeners. In this study, we explore if and how this is occurring in the NGSS era. We used a naturalistic inquiry to explore how an experienced first‐grade teacher used a new NGSS‐aligned unit that called for students to use the science and engineering practices (SEP) to build content knowledge. We used a macro‐analytic lens to answer the research question “how are class discussions shaped to address the SEP”? We used a micro‐analytic lens to answer the research question “how are students positioned during these science discussions in this classroom?” Evidence suggests that the teachers' whole class discussions incorporated and involved the SEP which were specified in the unit lessons for content learning. However, on a micro‐analytic level, we found that few students were positioned as active discussants. The teacher heavily relied on those students who could provide succinct and clearly relevant answers while positioning the remainder of the students as silent spectators. Implications from this research suggest that not only new NGSS curriculum materials need to focus on what students should know and do but they also need to address heuristics for teachers that show them how to position all of their students as active doers of science so all students have opportunities to build deeper, core science knowledge.

Considering discussion types to support collective sensemaking during a storyline unit

“…Nevertheless, some work has shown that the storyline approach can have positive effects on class participation across gender, racial, and ethnic groups (Krumm et al, 2020). In addition, whole class discussions in storyline units have been shown to position students as legitimate participants who work together to understand scientific phenomena (Zangori & Pinnow, 2020). Nevertheless, in that same study Zangori and Pinnow also found that not every discussion achieved these positive outcomes, highlighting again the need to understand how we can support teachers who use these materials to consistently engage students in discussions that support collective sensemaking.…”

“…One of the key ways to support this collective sensemaking is through classroom discourse that encourages students to figure out ideas based on evidence collected in class (Lemke, 1990;Zangori & Pinnow, 2020). Classroom talk is well-researched and much is known about how to support students in engaging in the discourse of science (Park et al, 2017).…”

Epistemological messages in a modeling‐based elementary science classroom compared with a traditional classroom

“…The teacher's discursive roles are important because the ways in which the teacher communicates with students can expand or shut down students' sense‐making practices (Schwarz et al, 2020). This teacher role is more crucial in the elementary science classroom since the elementary classroom is an important time for children to start building their relationship with science (Zangori & Pinnow, 2020). Nevertheless, there are only a few studies that have examined teacher discourse in terms of epistemological messages in modeling‐based elementary science classrooms.…”

Motivating Teaching, Sustaining Change in Practice: Design Principles for Teacher Learning in Project-Based Learning Contexts

“…Achieving this change entails a series of shifts over an extended period of purposeful and reflective activity (see Windschitl et al, 2008). The shifts involve abandoning traditional approaches that emphasize right answers, memorized procedures, and the role of the teacher as the possessor of knowledge, to students participating as agents in knowledge construction (Miller et al, 2018;Zangori & Pinnow, 2020). Teachers must create environments of productive uncertainty (Allen & Heredia, 2020), where students use scientific practices to figure out how phenomena work and build their understanding over time.…”