Developing Inquiry-as-Stance and Repertoires of Practice: Teacher Learning across Two Settings

Sixteen science educators joined a science teacher video club for one school year to collaboratively inquire into each other's classroom practice through the use of records of practice including classroom video clips and samples of student work. This group was focused on developing ambitious, equitable science teaching that capitalizes on students' ways of talking and thinking about important science ideas in order to co-construct, test, refine, and revise explanatory models. By analyzing both the teacher-to-teacher interactions taking place in the context of the video club and the on-going classroom teaching practice, this study fills important gaps in our understanding of teacher learning across settings of professional development and classroom practice. This study pursues answers to two groups of guiding questions: (1) How do teachers learn from each other in the context of collaborative inquiry groups, such as a science teacher video club? How do teachers draw upon classroom teaching experiences, re-interpret those experiences, and challenge each other's interpretations and choices made when teaching? (2) How are teachers' professional development experiences connected to and supported by teachers' on-going classroom practice? When the vision of science teaching developed in one context, such as a professional development setting, is different from the vision or teaching developed in another context, such as a local school, how do teachers wrestle with these differences to make choices about instructional practice? Using a sociocultural framework, this study traces the development of inquiry-as-stance as seen in teachers' stance-taking during collegial conversations while also tracing the development of teachers' repertoires of instructional practice. Analysis of discourse during teacher-to-teacher talk as well as during classroom interactions affords insights into the development of an inquiry stance and the evolution of instructional practice at the level of turn-by-turn talk contextualized in real school settings. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.