Practicing the Practice: Learning How to Guide Elementary Science Classroom Discussions in a Practice-Oriented Science Methods Course.

Exploring the Content and Pedagogical Approaches of a Practice-oriented Elementary Science Methods Course;Grossman"s Framework;Teacher Education;Guiding Classroom Discussions;Pedagogies of Enactment and Investigation;Elementary Science Teaching;Education;Social Sciences;Education Studies

Shah, Ashima MathurStarr, Mary L. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Exploring the Content and Pedagogical Approaches of a Practice-oriented Elementary Science Methods Course;    Grossman";    s Framework;    Teacher Education;    Guiding Classroom Discussions;    Pedagogies of Enactment and Investigation;    Elementary Science Teaching;    Education;    Social Sciences;    Education Studies;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/86263/amath_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

University methods courses are often criticized for telling pre-service teachers, or interns, about the theories behind teaching instead of preparing them to actually enact teaching. Shifting teacher education to be more ;;practice-oriented,” or to focus more explicitly on the work of teaching, is a current trend for re-designing the way we prepare teachers. This dissertation addresses the current need for research that unpacks the shiftto more practice-oriented approaches by studying the content and pedagogical approaches in a practice-oriented, masters-level elementary science methods course (n=42 interns).The course focused on preparing interns to guide science classroom discussions.Qualitative data, such as video records of course activities and interns’ written reflections, were collected across eight course sessions. Codes were applied at the sentence and paragraph level and then grouped into themes.Five content themes were identified: foregrounding student ideas and questions, steering discussion toward intended learning goals, supporting students to do thecognitive work, enacting teacher role of facilitator, and creating a classroom culture for science discussions. Three pedagogical approach themes were identified. First, theteacher educators created images of science discussions by modeling and showing videos of this practice. They also provided focused teaching experiences by helping internspractice the interactive aspects of teaching both in the methods classroom and with smaller groups of elementary students in schools. Finally, they structured the planningand debriefing phases of teaching so interns could learn from their teaching experiences and prepare well for future experiences.The findings were analyzed through the lens of Grossman and colleagues’ framework for teaching practice (2009) to reveal how the pedagogical approaches decomposed, represented, and approximated practice throughout course activities. Also,the teacher educators’ purposeful use of both pedagogies of investigation (to study teaching) and pedagogies of enactment (to practice enacting teaching) was uncovered.This work provides insights for the design of courses that prepare interns to translate theories about teaching into the interactive work teachers actually do. Also, itcontributes to building a common language for talking about the content of practiceoriented courses and for comparing the affordances and limitations of pedagogicalapproaches across teacher education settings.