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Eliciting, noticing, and responding to students' sense-making is important for advancing students' understanding and fostering meaningful participation in science. By sense-making, we mean wrestling with ideas, language, experiences, and perspectives in a community to figure out how and why the world works. In the bustle of an elementary classroom, noticing and productively responding to the seemingly disorderly processes of sense-making presents challenges for teachers. Further, sense-making interactions are especially consequential for racially, linguistically and culturally minoritized youth whose ways of knowing are more expansive than the narrow conceptions of science present in schools. One core challenge for supporting sense-making in classrooms has been understanding the nature of these complex, dynamic, and multi-faceted interactions. To address this challenge, we analyzed videos of classroom sense-making interactions along with teachers' reflections about those interactions to focus on "sense-making moments" or the composite set of moments called "episodes." Doing so enabled us to understand pedagogical moves, responses and resources that were leveraged in sense-making interactions as well as how teachers interpreted those moments. It also enabled us to determine characteristics of those interactions that expanded, maintained, or shut down opportunities for sense-making. We illustrate these findings using three cases chosen from a larger multiple studies research project with early career and experienced elementary teachers. These three nuanced cases deepen our collective understanding of complex sense-making interactions in elementary classrooms by offering alternative analysis of sense-making interactions and their consequences on future sense-making. For example, while one sense-making episode initially appeared chaotic, pedagogical moves to incorporate emergent ideas into the science narrative and challenging and connecting ideas moved toward expanding opportunities for sense-making. Unpacking sense-making moments is critical for understanding the nature and consequences of sense-making moments as well as how to better support teachers in providing sense-making opportunities for all students in science.

Scholarly calls to reform science education for all students emphasize scientific sense-making. Despite the importance of sense-making, few strategies exist to help novice teachers learn to notice and respond equitably to students' scientific sense-making in elementary science. In this article, we report on a qualitative case study in which we investigated sense-making moments that occurred when novice teachers facilitated classroom discussions. Findings suggest that when novice teachers "made space" in class discussions for sense-making--for example, by trying different responses to clarify student ideas or waiting before responding to figure out next steps--this expanded opportunities for shared epistemic authority; however, novices did not often recognize these moments as productive for sense-making. Findings also suggest that novice teachers may benefit from support to help them develop their abilities to notice, interpret, and respond equitably to students' scientific sense-making in class discussions.

Learning to teach within and across the settings of teacher education coursework and field experience in local schools is subject to the "two-worlds pitfall," where practices, norms, expectations, tools, and other aspects of teaching can be jarringly different. This remains an ever-present dilemma for preservice teachers, their teacher educators, and their school-based mentors. This collective case study follows two cohorts of secondary science teacher candidates (22 in total) through their field experiences in local schools to understand how they reorganized, repurposed, and retooled practice as they worked on noticing and responding to students using ambitious science teaching principles and practices. Analysis highlights how instructional experiences in K-12 classrooms and relationships with mentors afforded and constrained preservice teachers' efforts to recontextualize ambitious science teaching practices in the status quo science teaching contexts of local schools. Recommendations for increasing permeability between the two worlds of teacher preparation are included.

In this article, we summarize more than a decade of work on high-leverage practices being used in the context of science teacher preparation. We describe the challenges and insights that ultimately resulted in more robust practices, a diversified suite of tools to support these practices, expanded knowledge of our own teacher education pedagogies, and stronger bonds between our preparation program and its local network of K-12 schools. The special education community has now formulated an ambitious practice-based vision for professional preparation, and advocates will find our narratives to be a mix of cautionary tales and cause for optimism.

Purpose: This study investigates how the practice of dividing students and coursework into leveled categories persists in science education despite decades of efforts aimed at reducing inequities. This study makes underlying logics visible through an empirical analysis of how science educators attempt to reconcile an egalitarian vision of science for all students with divisive practices of grouping students and coursework into levels. Research Methods/Approach: This case study uses ethnographic methods during a 2-year period where researchers were embedded alongside teachers to investigate how a high school science department recreated hidden systems of leveled science coursework within a detracked institutional context. Data analysis draws on scholarship from Science and Technology Studies as well as organizational theory to examine how leveled categories are made through instructional logics built into teachers' work practice. Findings: Findings describe how certain students and science courses are categorized as "not honors material" through recursive discourses and practices that sort, divide, delay, and ultimately deny educational opportunities. Science teachers' instructional decision making was governed by two instructional logics: a mismatch logic and a not-yet-ready logic. These logics made it possible to enact stratification practices denying education opportunities to students seen as mismatched or unready for certain science coursework even as overt tracks were eliminated. Implications: Findings raise implications for current science education reform efforts aiming for greater equity, suggesting that categorization of science courses and students is entrenched in teachers' work practice and will need direct attention to dismantle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background/ContextThere are few examples from classrooms or the literature that provide a clear vision of teaching that simultaneously promotes rigorous disciplinary activity and is responsive to all students. Maintaining rigorous and equitable classroom discourse is a worthy goal, yet there is no clear consensus of how this actually works in a classroom.Focus of StudyWhat does highly rigorous and responsive talk sound like and how is this dialogue embedded in the social practices and activities of classrooms? Our aim was to examine student and teacher interactions in classroom episodes (warm-ups, small-group conversations, whole-group conversation, etc.) and contribute to a growing body of research that specifies equity in classroom practice.Research DesignThis mixed-method study examines differences in discourse within and across classroom episodes (warm-ups, small-group conversations, whole-group conversation, etc.) that elevated, or failed to elevate, students’ explanatory rigor in equitable ways. Data include 222 secondary science lessons (1,174 episodes) from 37 novice teachers. Lessons were videotaped and analyzed for the depth of students’ explanatory talk and the quality of responsive dialogue.FindingsThe findings support three statistical claims. First, high levels of rigor cannot be attained in classrooms where teachers are unresponsive to students’ ideas or puzzlements. Second, the architecture of a lesson matters. Teachers and students engaging in highly rigorous and responsive lessons turned potentially trivial episodes (such as warm-ups) of science activity into robust learning experiences, connected to other episodes in the same lesson. Third, episodes featuring one or more forms of responsive talk elevated rigor. There were three forms of responsive talk observed in classrooms: building on students’ science ideas, attending to students’ participation in the learning community, and folding in students’ lived experiences. Small but strategic moves within these forms were consequential for supporting rigor.Conclusions/RecommendationsThis paper challenges the notion that rigor and responsiveness are attributes of curricula or individual teachers. Rigorous curriculum is necessary but not sufficient for ambitious and equitable science learning experiences; the interactions within the classroom are essential for sustaining the highest quality of scientific practice and sense-making. The data supported the development of a framework that articulates incremental differences in supporting students’ explanatory rigor and three dimensions of responsiveness. We describe implications for using this framework in the design of teacher programs and professional development models.

When teachers engage in forms of science teaching that disrupt the status quo of typical school science practices, they often experience dilemmas as problems of practice that are difficult--or even impossible--to solve. This instrumental case study examines one teacher's efforts to teach science for equity across two contexts: a public middle school and a summer program for low-income students of color. By tracing intersecting tensions experienced when trying to teach science more equitably, we describe how systems of tensions can serve multiple functions: (1) as roadblocks for teachers when knowledge-production predicaments arise, (2) as dilemmas to be managed by teachers when there is difficulty defining educational disparities, and (3) as potentially productive as teachers and educational researchers wrestle with inherent tensions between models for teaching. Findings afford insight into why teachers experience uneven progress as they work to teach science for equity. Further examination of tensions teaching science for equity reveals deep paradoxes extending beyond the case of a single teacher into pedagogical frameworks underlying expectations for teaching science more equitably in schools.

Purpose: When school leaders advance strategic plans focused on improving educational equity through data-driven decision making, how do policies-as-practiced unfold in the daily work of science teachers? The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach: This ethnographic study examines how data-centric accountability and improvement efforts surface as practices for 36 science teachers in three secondary schools. For two years, researchers were embedded in schools alongside teachers moving through daily classroom practice, meetings with colleagues and leaders, data-centric meetings, and professional development days. Findings: Bundled initiatives created consequences for science educators including missed opportunities to capitalize on student-generated ideas, to foster science sensemaking, and to pursue meaningful and equitable science learning. Problematic policy-practice intersections arose, in part, because of school leaders' framing of district and school initiatives in ways that undermined equity in science education. Practical implications: From the perspective of science education, this paper raises an alarming problem for equitable science teaching. Lessons learned from missteps seen in this study have practical implications for others attempting similar work. The paper suggests alternatives for supporting meaningful and equitable science education. Originality/value: Seeing leaders' framing of policy initiatives, their bundling of performance goals, equity and accountability efforts, and their instructional coaching activities from the point of view of teachers affords unique insight into how leadership activities mediate policies in schools.

In her Forum piece, "What's an Adult Numeracy Teacher to Teach? Negotiating the Complexity of Adult Numeracy Instruction," Lynda Ginsburg set the stage of the current problem (poor numeracy levels in American adults) and the bevy of standards, legislation, and new exams that have recently been developed to address it. Ginsburg also highlighted some of the ways in which these different "remedies" also compete with one another, as well as with the priorities of adult students. In the midst of all these demands, how does a teacher decide what to teach? Braaten uses this Forum piece to offer her criteria for making decisions about what to include, what to emphasize, and what to leave out. Braaten also adds that, just like the students, the programs and teachers need relevant goals with realistic timelines.

Climate education in elementary grades offers a chance to teach climate science, to help students understand how serious climate change is, to focus on ecosystems and global social systems, and to work toward justiceoriented solutions. This article describes the work of nearly 70 fourth grade bilingual students, their teachers and librarian, and support from multiple community volunteers to investigate persistent problems of flooding in local waterways. Children did not study flooding as an abstract concept; instead, they approached their study of flood mitigation as civic actors whose research and voices matter for shaping public policy for their community. Over the course of a school year, children worked with teams of educators and community volunteers in a weekly science and civic engagement unit focused on connecting with the waterways and ecosystems that experience frequent and sometimes devastating flooding. During this unit of study, children made sense of flooding, the role that adaptation and mitigation can play in resilient responses to climate change, and the role that their voices can play as civic actors whose input is meaningful for shaping civic decisions not in the future as adults but now as children who have a stake in how their community functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the Data Puzzles instructional framework as a means to engage middle school students in the exploration of wind energy and its potential for future wind farm locations across the United States. By eliciting and leveraging student resources through an opening scenario that prompts personal experiences with wind, teachers can effectively connect students to abstract science phenomena and facilitate sensemaking. The Data Puzzles framework combines authentic scientific data sets with the Ambitious Science Teaching pedagogical practices to support students in constructing knowledge and addressing contemporary phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current theories of novice teacher learning have not accounted for the varied influences of pedagogical training, subject matter knowledge, tools, identity, and institutional context(s) on the development of classroom practice. We examined how 26 beginning secondary science teachers developed instructional repertoires as they participated in two types of communities, one infused with discourses and tools supportive of ambitious teaching and another that reinforced traditional practices. We found three trajectories of practice--each with distinctive signatures for how novices engaged students intellectually. Differences were explained by: the communities with which teachers most closely identified, the degree to which teachers' discourses about student thinking were developed within these communities, and how teachers used tools from the communities to shape their practice. (Contains 1 table, 2 figures, and 1 note.)

Recent calls for teacher preparation to become more grounded in practice prompt the questions: Which practices? and perhaps more fundamentally, what counts as a model of instruction worth learning for a new professional--i.e., the beginner's repertoire? In this report, we argue the following: If a defined set of subject-specific high-leverage practices could be articulated and taught during teacher preparation and induction, the broader teacher education community could collectively refine these practices as well as the tools and other resources that support their appropriation by novices across various learning-to-teach contexts. To anchor our conversation about these issues, we describe the evolution, in design, and enactment, of a "candidate core" and a suite of tools that supported the approximation of equitable and rigorous pedagogy for several groups of beginning science teachers. Their struggles and successes in taking up ambitious practice informed not only our designs for a beginner's repertoire but also a system of tools and socioprofessional routines that could foster such teaching over time. (Contains 3 figures, 1 table and 2 footnotes.)

Scientific explanation plays a central role in science education reform documents, including the "Benchmarks for Science Literacy," the "National Science Education Standards", and the recent research report, "Taking Science to School." While scientific explanation receives significant emphases in these documents, there is little discussion or consensus within the science education community about the nature of explanation itself. However, debates about scientific explanation have been a mainstay for philosophers of science for decades. We argue that a more clearly articulated conceptualization of scientific explanation for science education is necessary for making the vision of science education reform a reality. In this essay, we use major philosophical theories of scientific explanation as lenses to examine how the science education community has constructed the idea of explanation. We also examine instructional practice in school science settings, including our own classrooms, where teachers and students are working to explain natural phenomena. Using these examples, we offer suggestions for preparing both educators and young learners to engage in explanatory discourses that are reasonably accountable to authentic epistemic practice in science. (Contains 2 footnotes and 3 tables.)

Background/Context: The collegial analysis of student work artifacts has been effective in advancing the practice of experienced teachers; however, the use of such strategies as a centerpiece for induction has not been explored, nor has the development of tool systems to support such activity with novices. Purpose/Objective: We tested the hypothesis that first-year teachers could take up forms of ambitious pedagogy under the following conditions: 1) that reform-based practices introduced in teacher preparation would be the focus of collaborative inquiry throughout the first year of teaching, 2) that participants use analyses of their students' work as the basis of critique and change in practice, and 3) that special tools be employed that help participants hypothesize about relationships between instruction and student performance. Participants: Eleven secondary science teachers engaged in tool-supported collegial analysis of their students' work over two years, spanning pre-service and in-service contexts. Research Design: We used a qualitative multi-case study approach, incorporating videotapes of collaborative inquiry (CFG) sessions, classroom observations, student-created artifacts, interviews, and field notes. The primary cases were of the CFG sessions themselves. Analysis entailed identifying patterns of participation across CFG sessions and changes in classroom practice during induction. Findings: More than one third of the group developed elements of expert-like teaching, with the greatest gains made in pressing their students for evidence-based scientific explanations, a practice that was the focus of their regular examinations of student work. For a majority--those who initially held the most problematized images of the relationships between teaching and learning--the system of tools (rubrics and protocol) was critical in allowing deep analyses of students' work and supporting a shared language that catalyzed conversations linking "what counts" as scientific explanation with the re-calibration of expectations for students. This, in turn, helped participants envision more specialized forms of scaffolding for learners. Conclusions: Those who begin their careers with a problematized view of the relationships between teaching and learning are not only more likely to appropriate sophisticated practices early, but also to benefit from evidence-based collaborative inquiry into practice. This study also highlights the potentially powerful role of tools and tool-based routines, tailored to the needs of beginning teachers, in fostering ambitious pedagogy. This success, we believe, can support the design of more robust systems of tools for early career teachers' collaborative inquiry and can inform theory around the implementation of these tools.

This article presents a model of collaborative inquiry for groups of science teachers who want to systematically improve their practice through analyses of student work. The five-phase APEX[superscript ST] (Advancing High-Leverage Practices by Examining Student Thinking) model is appropriate for students of all achievement levels. It focuses on high-leverage practices (e.g., pressing for evidence-based explanations) and longitudinal learning for both students and teachers over the course of a year. (Contains 2 figures and 4 online resources.)

One hundred years after its conception, the scientific method continues to reinforce a kind of cultural lore about what it means to participate in inquiry. As commonly implemented in venues ranging from middle school classrooms to undergraduate laboratories, it emphasizes the testing of predictions rather than ideas, focuses learners on material activity at the expense of deep subject matter understanding, and lacks epistemic framing relevant to the discipline. While critiques of the scientific method are not new, its cumulative effects on learners' conceptions of science have not been clearly articulated. We discuss these effects using findings from a series of five studies with degree-holding graduates of our educational system who were preparing to enter the teaching profession and apprentice their own young learners into unproblematic images of how science is done. We then offer an alternative vision for investigative science--model-based inquiry (MBI)--as a system of activity and discourse that engages learners more deeply with content and embodies five epistemic characteristics of scientific knowledge: that ideas represented in the form of models are testable, revisable, explanatory, conjectural, and generative. We represent MBI as an interconnected set of classroom conversations and provide examples of its implementation and its limitations. (Contains 6 figures.)

To test whether epistemically unproblematic ways of thinking and talking about science could be transformed during preservice teacher training, we designed a system of learning activities based on a set of "heuristics for progressive disciplinary discourse" (HPDD). The HPDD outline six design principles of learning environments where the aim is to foster learners' participation in material and discursive activities that characterize the work of scientists. After tracking participants through university coursework where the HPDD was employed and into their teaching practicums, we found that most came to reconceptualize the interrelated roles of models, theory, evidence, and argument. These ideas ultimately supported a shift in their goals for scientific investigation--from "proving" a hypothesis, to testing and revising explanatory models. Preliminary findings from teaching episodes with their own secondary students indicated that some participants took up "epistemically ambitious" classroom practices, pressing learners to develop testable models of natural phenomena and gather evidence to link observations with underlying explanatory processes. (Contains 6 tables and 2 footnotes.)

Drawing from two years of ethnographic data, this case study details one middle school science and mathematics teacher's experience of new statewide teacher evaluation processes. Initially, these processes held potential as professional learning opportunities. However, limited opportunities for sense-making about what counts as “good” teaching foreclosed on teacher learning contributing to teacher demoralization. Evaluation processes eroded teacher professional identity by reshaping notions of professional competence in ways that did not make sense to teachers. Insights from this study inform debates about teacher evaluation and contribute to scholarship questioning the relationship between accountability policies in education and teachers' professional growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dissonance during teacher preparation is commonplace. Rather than presenting a roadblock, dissonance may be critical for preservice teachers' learning. This case study examines how to organize teacher education to embrace dissonance through deliberative dialogue. Findings suggest that scaffolding during dialogues created conditions where participants could engage with peers' perspectives, rethink assumptions, and deepen interpretive power for understanding students' ideas. Dialogues encouraged persistence when dissonance threatened to prohibit further sense-making. By persisting, tensions became productive rather than prohibitive for sense-making. Findings have implications for the design of teacher preparation experiences and for theorizing about how beginning teachers learn across experiences. • Critical Friends Group dialogues supported sense-making for preservice teachers facing dissonance after student-teaching. • Peers' perspectives strengthened preservice teachers' interpretations of students' contributions and checked assumptions. • Dissonance from competing epistemic stances about research and evidence threatened to halt preservice teachers' progress. • Sustained dialogue transformed dissonance from prohibitive to productive for synthesizing preservice teacher sense-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]