Examining mentor teachers’ critical pedagogical discourses and participation in an era of changing science standards and pedagogies

Abstract

We provided secondary science mentor teachers (MTs) with a series of professional learning sessions to support their work with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and the Ambitious Science Teaching (AST) framework, which their preservice teachers (PSTs) encountered in methods courses. By investigating the MTs' critical pedagogical discourses using a situative theoretical approach, we found that how the MTs made sense of NGSS and AST differed depending on how they gauged student learning, that the MTs’ participation differed over time given their perceptions of NGSS and AST, and that the teacher preparation program needed to provide more support for MTs.