This study proposes a strategic framework to guide teachers' curriculum adaptation, planning, and enactment as a lever for redistributing epistemic agency. This framework intends to position teachers as strategic decision-makers around when and how to open up aspects of their curriculum. We argue that seeing the aspects of Next Generation Science Standardsaligned curricula-the methods of investigation, the anchoring phenomena, and the explanatory models students construct-as entry points for redistributing epistemic agency may help teachers make inroads to shifting their classroom practice towards more responsive instruction. Importantly, our tool acknowledges that there are different "levels" at which teachers might strategically decide to open up space for student decisionmaking. These decisions may have a differential impact on students' subsequent participation in science practices. In this paper, we will use three cases to highlight the specific and incremental ways that teachers can open up aspects of the curriculum and how those openings redistributed epistemic agency in their classroom. We argue that this framework may be used as a tool for engaging teachers in conversation about how they can begin to position students as partners in the epistemic decisions that drive classroom activity.
This article reports the results of a randomized control trial of a semester-long intervention designed to promote ninth-grade science students’ use of text-based investigation to create explanatory models of biological phenomena. The main research question was whether the student participants in the intervention outperformed the students in the control classes, as assessed by several measures of comprehension and application of information to modeling biological phenomena not covered in the instruction. A second research question examined the impact on the instructional practices of the teachers who implemented the intervention. Multilevel modeling of outcome measures, controlling for preexisting differences at individual and school levels, indicated significant effects on the intervention students and teachers relative to the controls. Implications for classroom instruction and teacher professional development are discussed.
Although existing literature suggests that teachers perceive, mobilize, and leverage resources to support ambitious instruction, less is known about how teachers and students jointly take up resources for co-constructing scientific knowledge. This study examines how teachersThere is a rich body of scholarship in educational policy, mathematics, and most recently, science education that has examined how teachers utilize resources to support and sustain ambitious instruction. Resources are the set of social, material, and intellectual tools that teachers use to support disciplinary learning in classrooms (Cohen et al., 2003;Lampert et al., 2011). Teacher-teacher interactions in professional learning communities or professional development sessions can become resources when they facilitate the exchange of new pedagogical ideas or support teachers use of new curriculum materials (Frank et al., 2004;Horn et al., 2020). Teacher's advice-seeking networks or district-level policies can also become resources when they help teachers build the social capital that is needed to sustain ambitious pedagogies within and across schools (Coburn et al., 2012). Policy documents, curriculum materials, or technological tools can stimulate teachers to re-examine what it means to know and understand a discipline, and bring their new knowledge about disciplinary inquiry into their classroom by experimenting with new discourse routines, texts, and tools (
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