Research, practice, and teacher internship

Abstract

In the February 1996 JRST editorial, Pekarek, Krockover, and Shepardson despaired over the lack of teachers' application of research in informing their day-to-day practice. We agree that such a theory-practice (or research-practice) gap by science teachers deserves their concern. We would like the research community to know that some practitioners are listening. Researchers calling for greater participation in action research: please keep calling. You are being heard. Do not, however, look to the status quo to implement your cutting edge ideas. For those researchers out on your edge of theory, here is a response from some practitioners who are out on our edge of classroom teaching.As a brief introduction, we are science teachers in a high school in London, Ontario, Canada. In our practice over the past few years, we have become increasingly involved with conceptual change (CC) pedagogy (e.g., Posner, Strike, Hewson, & Gertzhog, 1982;Wittrock, 1994) and a teacher-as-researcher ethos. We would like to report to the research community where advances in research have taken us, and where we would appreciate future research to be directed.Our classroom is directed at student representations of phenomena. We have found several effective ways of teaching students to commit their notions to paper in pictures and words. We then use their pictures, plus discussion and confounding experiments, to generate cognitive conflict. As an interesting aside, we have found that the size of the picture matters: large diagrams are much more effective at promoting cognitive conflict than postage-stamp diagrams. The balance of our classroom research is devoted to clarifying age-appropriate unifying principles, and finding effective ways of representing those principles.In addition, we have extended these ideas into our work with student teachers. We have developed a model of internship in which we encourage novice teachers to use CC pedagogy in dealing with students' naive ideas about science. At the same time, we use CC theory to disequilibrate student teachers' naive ideas about learning science.

Confronting the Need for Conceptual Change in Pre-Service Science Education

“…Our students' experience clearly illustrated the "theory-practice" problem observed by McGoey and Ross (1999) who found that their science teacher interns were more interested in the mechanics of teaching ("how to") instead of the theory behind the mechanics ("how come"). As reasonable as this view is for any apprentice, the authors, like us, found that supporting a transition in student perspective from "how to" to "how come" was not easy or comfortable for the interns.…”

“…We recommend that teacher education programs addressing the sciences adopt a different framework to support the integration of theory and practice as recommended by McGoey and Ross (1999). We recommend formal mentorship programs that extend beyond graduation to help new teachers manage the practical issues that will arise as they attempt to integrate new ideas into their classroom pedagogy.…”

Undervisa Naturvetenskap genom Inquiry : En studie av två högstadielärare

“…Det finns mycket Nadidaktisk forskning om framgångsrik undervisning, men fortfarande syns inte mycket av detta i skolornas klassrum. Detta gap mellan teori och praktik är en viktig aspekt när det gäller förändringar av naturvetenskaplig undervisning (Abell & Lederman, 2007;McGoey & Ross, 1999;Rocard, 2007). McGoey och Ross (1999) menar att man genom att se på gapet från lärarnas perspektiv lättare kan bygga en bro mellan teori och praktik.…”

A framework for teaching scientific inquiry in upper secondary school chemistry

“…McGoey and Ross (1999) compared science teachers' reports to educational research reports and marked the difference between the two as “how to” as opposed to “how come.” They argued that the theory‐practice gap could be bridged by research starting from the teacher's perspective. Wallace (2003) emphasized three essentials, founded on social constructivist models of learning and teaching (Vygostky, 1978).…”