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. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 96:878–903, 2012

The Next Generation Science Standards and other reforms call for students to learn science‐as‐practice, which I argue requires students to become epistemic agents—shaping the knowledge and practice of a science community. I examined a framework for teaching—ambitious instruction—that scaffolds students’ learning of science‐as‐practice as they act as epistemic agents. Using a situative theoretical framework and analytical tools from science studies literature, I conducted a multicase study of five beginning teachers. I found that (a) teachers and students negotiated their roles as they decided on “what counted” as science ideas. Participants positioned some ideas as important by making discursive moves, signaling students to either work on the ideas as epistemic agents or, alternatively, to judge the information as “right” or “wrong”; (b) the participants worked to make science a “public” or “private” enterprise. The framing of science then influenced how teachers and students participated in their science practice community; (c) the negotiation of “what counted” as science ideas and the framing of science as “public” or “private” influenced (i) the percentage of students sharing ideas on the public plane, and (ii) the number of science ideas initiated and kept in play on the public plane.

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) [Achieve, Inc. []] represent a broad consensus that teaching and learning expectations must change. Rather than memorizing and reciting information, students are now expected to engage in science practices to develop a deep understanding of core science ideas. While we want to share in the optimism about NGSS, the standards are not a silver bullet for transforming science classrooms. They are, instead, another reform document designed to suggest opportunities for students to actively engage in knowledge construction themselves—to be doers of science, rather than receivers of facts. A foundational contradiction underlies these efforts—while we want students to do science, we seem to mean that students should mimic practices others have selected as important to learn, and content others have selected as foundational. As a result, students are rarely positioned with epistemic agency: the power to shape the knowledge production and practices of a community [Stroupe [] Science Education 98:487–516]. We argue that unless the field tackles significant questions around precisely how students can be active agents in knowledge construction, we will likely continue to implement learning environments that position students as receivers of scientific facts and practices, even as classrooms adopt NGSS. In this conceptual analysis article, we unpack the construct of “epistemic agency” and its relationship to the NGSS, using a vignette to illustrate how students are typically positioned in researcher‐developed curricula. The vignette, which describes a seventh‐grade class exploring which of two lakes is more at risk for invasion by the spiny water flea, provides an exemplar of what we take to be a loose consensus about learning environments consistent with the NGSS. However, when we look beneath the surface of the consensus, the vignette reveals contradictions and unresolved issues around epistemic agency.

Instructional tasks are key features of classroom practice, but little is known about how different components of tasks-such as selecting or designing tasks for a lesson, launching, and implementing them with students-shape the conditions for students' intellectual engagement in science classrooms. Employing a qualitative multiple case study approach, we analyzed 57 science lessons taught by 19 first-year teachers. We examined the potential for students' intellectual work built into the tasks across the phases of instruction, and how the demand of the unfolding task deepened (or failed to deepen) students' engagement in science. The findings suggest the importance of beginning a lesson with high quality instructional tasks-complex tasks that bear appropriate levels of epistemic uncertainty for a particular group of students in a particular moment. Beginning a lesson with high quality tasks; however, was insufficient by itself to ensure rigorous learning opportunities. With the use of complex tasks, higher quality opportunities to learn were observed in lessons in which: (i) the tasks were framed as a process of understanding contextualized phenomena; (ii) the specific disciplinary concepts in the task were related to big science ideas that transcended the activities themselves; and (iii) students' implementation of these tasks were structured using tools that supported changes in thinking. #

No abstract