Truth, success, and faith: Novice teachers’ perceptions of what's at risk in responsive teaching in science

Leslie J Atkins Elliott,Amy D Robertson

doi:10.1002/sce.21568

Leslie J Atkins Elliott, Amy D Robertson

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21568

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Abstract

AbstractResponsive teaching—or teaching that builds from the “seeds of science” in student thinking—is depicted in STEM education literature as both important and challenging. U.S. science education reform has been calling for teachers to enact instruction that attends to and takes up the substance of students’ STEM ideas; however, responsive teaching represents a substantial shift from the current state of affairs in most U.S. classrooms, where content is often presented authoritatively as facts, definitions, and algorithms, with little consideration of student thinking. Drawing on language from literature about sense‐making, this paper identifies some of the “vexation points” that novice science teachers face as they consider implementing responsive teaching practices in science—that is, what doesn't make sense, to teachers, about this instructional approach. In particular, we show that novice teachers express moral concerns about responsive teaching; themes in their written reflections suggest that they perceive responsive teaching to put truth, success, and faith at risk. We argue that though these concerns originally seem distinct from the institutional constraints to responsive teaching posed by the literature, teachers’ concerns about truth, success, and faith are in fact mutually reinforced by and reinforcing of external constraints. We use this connection to pose implications for research and teacher education.

Highlights

A growing consensus calls on teachers to attend and respond to the substance of students’ ideas in STEM classrooms, orienting toward these ideas as productive starting places from which to build, instructionally (Ball, 1993; Hammer, Goldberg, & Fargason, 2012; Robertson, Scherr, & Hammer, 2016; Sherin, Jacobs, & Philipp, 2011)
Part of what was puzzling was that the concerns articulated by Learning Assistants (LAs) who chose not to enact responsive teaching (RT) resonated with sticking points that the first author had heard LAs express in every year that she introduced RT in her pedagogy course, and with concerns that she hears in‐service teachers elevate in professional development
We started with 243 reading reflections, 250 teaching reflections, and 16 class projects submitted by 36 distinct LAs during those 4 years. (Individual LAs’ participation is tracked in the appendix.) As noted above, we narrowed this data set to responses that expressed concerns about responsive teaching, and in particular those concerns that seemed to be irresolvable or major sticking points; this was often indicated by the use of affectively charged language, such as “absurd,” “moral,” “great disadvantage,” or “backlash.” We looked for themes (Krippendorff, 2013) in these concerns within and across cohorts

Summary

Introduction

A growing consensus calls on teachers to attend and respond to the substance of students’ ideas in STEM classrooms, orienting toward these ideas as productive starting places from which to build, instructionally (Ball, 1993; Hammer, Goldberg, & Fargason, 2012; Robertson, Scherr, & Hammer, 2016; Sherin, Jacobs, & Philipp, 2011). As part of a university pedagogy course focusing on being responsive to students’ ideas, Jane, a student in the course, reflected on a class discussion about what constitutes the “beginnings” of scientific understandings, or “seeds,” that teachers might draw on in class. I see Ofala's and Sean's ideas about odd and even numbers as examples of seeds of reasoning They both show great reasoning and are able to answer questions about their ideas. Ofala's idea is an example of a seed of canonical thinking because it shows great reasoning but it is a seed towards the canonical answer

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