Teacher scripts in science teaching

Abstract

Abstract:Awareness of teacher scripts is of crucial importance to reflection on practice, and represents one means of widening the scope of classroom performance. The first part of this work provides a detailed description of three scripts employed by a novice science teacher within the topic of The Structure of Flowers, and illustrates the process by which they were derived through a Modelling Instrument. In the second part, the relationships between beliefs and actions are explored through tree diagrams. Finally, there is a discussion of how entrenched scripts may act as obstacles to professional development. Key words:Teacher's beliefs and actions, Modelling instrument, Scripts, Science Teaching, Tree diagrams Theoretical frameworkTo understand teaching is to understand the teacher's thinking and practice (Shulman 1986), and this is fullest when these two domains, thinking and practice, are studied together and examined in relation to each other (Clark & Peterson 1986).Several approaches are available to the researcher in this respect. Modelling teaching (Schoenfeld 1998, AUTHOR 1 2006, AUTHOR et al. 2007, for example, focuses on the teacher's cognitions (beliefs, knowledge, goals) and actions. Schoenfeld (1998) believes that if, in a specific context, there is a good comprehension of the beliefs, goals and knowledge underlying a teacher's decisions and actions, then a coherent and detailed explanation of what that teacher did and why can be achieved. He proposes an instrument composed of three columns, the first specifying information about goals, knowledge and beliefs, along with the triggering and terminating events of each episode, the second providing an overview of the teacher's actions from a general perspective, and the final column giving a very detailed description of each action performed by the teacher. This paper presents an instance of such modelling through the application of a Modelling Instrument (MI) (AUTHOR 1 2006, AUTHOR 1 et al. 2007, 2008a, derived from adaptations to Schoenfeld (1998aSchoenfeld ( ,b, 2000, in addition to studies by Aguirre and Speer (1999), Schoenfeld et al. (2000), Zimmerlin and Nelson (2000), Sherin et al. (2000), Shulman (1986Shulman ( , 1987, AUTHOR 2 (1998), Climent (2002), Cañal (2004 and Santos (1991). The adaptations to Schoenfeld's instrument take two forms. On the one hand, the first column takes into account different dimensions relating to the teacher's knowledge. On the other, the second and third columns are conflated into one, as the focus of the paper is on the identification of meaningful action sequences and the context which produces them, rather than the accumulated minutiae of each brief action. This adaptation will be implemented in section three.Through the application of the MI, a wide variety of scripts, routines and improvisations employed by a novice teacher was detailed, in respect of the topic Plant Diversity, of which three scripts are presented here by way of example, along with one routine and one improvisation, all sharing the theme T...

Supporting newly hired teachers of science: attaining teacher professional standards

“…Beliefs are often considered to be constructs that filter incoming information and influence actions (Jones & Carter, 2007). Monteiro, Carrillo, and Aguaded (2010) reinforced this premise with their study of a first-year primary school teacher in Portugal. They documented the relationship of practice with beliefs and knowledge, through 'scripts'.…”