Beginning Teachers’ Use of a Constructivist Teaching Approach to Improve their Students’ Understanding of Science Through Classroom Discussion

Abstract

This chapter reports on Master of Teaching (MTeach) candidates’ introduction to the use of a teaching approach known as the Conceptual Understanding Procedure (CUP) (Mills et al., 1999) designed to aid development of understanding of science concepts that their students may find difficult. CUP is a constructivist teaching approach that uses structured classroom discussion of real-world situations which are intended to stimulate students’ understanding of complex and abstract concepts in science topics by focusing on authentic contexts. Observations of MTeach candidates’ use of this approach with students during their professional practice placement and their reflections on its effect on student learning were collected and analysed. Despite some common challenges encountered with the use of CUP as reported in the literature and found in this study, almost all the teacher candidates gave positive feedback on this teaching approach. In this chapter we present cases of the impact of teaching with CUP on the development of beginning teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge.