Learning to Become a Physics Teacher: A Case Study of Experienced Teachers

Abstract

This paper focuses on Wegner’s concept of learning to examine how experienced physics teachers conceptualize and explain their professional identity. Participants were four female physics teachers with more than 15 years of teaching experience. These four teachers were selected as illustrative and contrastive cases for the purpose of the study. The data collection included semi-structured interviews and field notes from classroom observations in each participant’s classroom. Interview and classroom observation data were analyzed through the constant-comparative method. The results showed that these teachers had positive and negative experiences in different types of schools; and higher-achieving students motivated these teachers to solve different types of problems. Although teachers believed that science should be taught through experiments or inquiry-based instruction, they did not have any opportunity to teach in a laboratory. Their role was confined to teaching in a classroom to solve problems. They defined their concept of learning to become a physics teacher with metaphors that focused on the cognitive demands of teaching and the learning process. Further research on teacher education should support teacher development through addressing social and epistemic demands of teaching and learning.