From Ideal to Practical—A Design of Teacher Professional Development on Socioscientific Issues

Abstract

As consensus towards teaching science for citizenship grows, so grows the need to prepare science teachers to pursue this goal. Implementation of socioscientific issues (SSI) is one of the most prominent theoretical and practical frameworks developed to support scientific literacy and preparing students as informed citizens. However, implementation of SSI holds great challenges for science teachers. Longitudinal professional development (PD) programs were designed to overcome these barriers, yet at the same time many educational systems lack the resources, both in terms of budget and time to meet such intense programs. In this paper, we introduce a design of a short-term PD course that was conducted in Israel. The PD was specifically tailored for secondary school science teachers, with the goal to support them in implementing SSI. Employing an educational design research framework, we tested our PD design over a span of three consecutive years. Through an iterative design process, we were able to make modifications to the program based on data collected and analyzed from the previous year. The structure of the PD is based on four SSI aspects: (a) introduction to SSI, (b) argumentation in SSI context, (c) SSI operationalization, and (d) science communication. In this paper, we provide detailed explanations for each of these aspects, justify the changes made to the PD design, and highlight both promising and less effective strategies for engaging teachers in SSI. Ultimately, we propose a comprehensive SSI PD model that can effectively prepare teachers to take their initial steps in implementing SSI, while remaining adaptable to diverse educational systems.