ABSTRACT: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.

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

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.

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. #

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.