Designing Teacher Education and Professional Development Activities for Science Learning

Abstract

The resources presented in this chapter are based on video presenting a variety of practices. This design is based on classroom videos, collected as data in research studies on science classroom practices in relation to students’ learning. The first part of the chapter will present the analysis of a 10th grade physics classroom during a teaching sequence on mechanics. This analysis is focused on how the progression of knowledge, its continuity and scientific practices are developed in the classroom in relation to the evolution of the respective students’ and teachers’ ownership of knowledge. This students’ ownership, which leads to a degree of intellectual autonomy, is a particular condition of learning for IBSE. It is related to the way that taught knowledge is involved in the classroom. The second part of the chapter proposes some teaching conditions to develop students’ intellectual autonomy or in other words to develop a responsibility vis-a-vis knowledge: sharing some common knowledge and meaningful vocabulary, managing moments of “epistemic uncertainty”, institutionalizing the main elements of knowledge involved in the previous class activity and differentiating teaching and learning time. Then we associate these conditions to specific teacher’s actions. This set of conditions and actions can be a base for professional teacher development.