Practice What You Teach: A Video-Based Practicum Model of Professional Development for Elementary Science Teachers

Abstract

This study examines an innovative professional development program that provides teachers with an opportunity to practice pedagogical strategies in a low stakes classroom context. Elementary teachers participated in a one-week summer Institute and two-week Practicum focused on learning strategies for facilitating scientific discourse and argumentation in their classrooms. During the Practicum, teachers taught lessons in a summer program for elementary school students and engaged in daily video-based discussions to reflect on their instruction. This study identified the instructional practices that were most emphasized during the Institute and examined the extent to which teachers took up those practices during the subsequent practicum experience. A classroom vignette illustrates how one teacher engaged her students in the discourse practices, and a coaching vignette portrays her video reflection group's discussion of the episode. Findings suggest that the focal instructional practices were taken up to different degrees during the Practicum, and that opportunities for practice and reflection are potentially valuable features of professional development programs. The project illustrates the value of video as a tool for both professional development and research.Keywords: professional development, science talk, pedagogy, science education, science instruction, classroom video DOI: 10.14712/23363177.2015.79 A growing body of empirical research on the structure, content and outcomes of effective professional development (PD) provides insights about the characteristics of programs that provide high-quality, high-impact learning opportunities for teachers. As Desimone (2009) argues, "there is a research consensus on the main features of professional development that have been associated with changes in knowledge, practice, and, to a lesser extent, student achievement" (p. 183). These features include: 1) a focus on subject matter content and how students learn that content;

Teachers’ Emotions in Teacher Development: Do They Matter?

“…Berson et al (2015) therefore claimed that it is necessary to identify the basal mechanisms that lie behind successful implementations of change. We believe that one such mechanism, which has received little empirical attention, is the process of reconstructing self-understanding and the emotions that accompany it, which we have discussed in this study.…”

Connecting student interests and questions with science learning goals through project-based storylines

“…Our professional learning workshops provide teachers with opportunities to experience these moves as learners, and to practice them through teaching rehearsals (Lampert et al, 2013) to help them develop confidence in the use of these moves and support the development of new inclusive classroom norms (Debarger et al, 2017;Reiser, Michaels, et al, 2017). It is also possible to integrate supports for monitoring patterns in which students' contributions are being solicited and taken up (Berson et al, 2018;Penuel & Watkins, 2019).…”

Video-Based Reflection on Teaching: What Makes It Effective?

“…From this perspective, it is interesting to see − most clearly in the interventions studied by Schindler et al (cf. Pehmer et al, 2015;Schindler et al, 2015) and Berson et al (2015) − that the challenge to teachers of translating thought into action crucially depended on opportunities to repeatedly collaborate on lesson planning and move rapidly through complete cycles of planning, teaching and reflection. This finding suggests the importance of designing PD activities as consecutive cycles.…”