Professional knowledge for science teaching develops over time and interplays with professional experiences in field. In the present study, we explore student teachers' reflective conversation upon teaching experiences, with pedagogical content knowledge, PCK, as an analytical lens. The empirical data is based on nine meetings, with groups of 3-6 student teachers with an academic degree, at three different periods during their one-year short-track teacher education program. The findings show how student teachers focus on the PCK component instructional strategies in their discussion. A difference between the different sets of meetings is the increased presence of discussions regarding assessment of student learning. The findings also elicit different ways of relating components of PCK in varying contexts. The shift over time from a focus on teachers' instructional strategies to also including students' understanding indicates a development toward becoming a teacher. Even though a structured discussion with theoretically grounded didactic questions is established, it is challenging to deepen the discussion when the student teachers' varying teaching experiences are present at the same time. Nevertheless, the study shows the possibilities of structured group discussions about field experiences in a collegial setting in a shorttrack teacher education program, regarding student teachers' development as "becoming teachers."
In this study we investigate teachers’ collegial discussions about students’ science knowledge, in a context of collaborative planning and evaluation of teaching concerning the human body. The empirical data consists of recordings of four meetings with researchers and one team of science teachers in a Swedish compulsory school. This study contributes to the understanding of collegial discussions as such and in particular what the teachers attend to as salient science knowledge. Making use of a phenomenographic approach, the result consists of a set of categories of teachers’ qualitatively different ways of expressing students’ science knowledge. When teachers relate the students’ science knowledge to their teaching it opens for an interdependent approach to teaching and assessment, in contrast to an instrumental way of viewing scientific knowledge, particularly in grading situations. We discuss how the identified qualitative differences have implications for teachers’ possibilities of professional development, e.g. regarding subject didactical knowledge.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.