A Design-Based Self-Study of the Development of Student Reflection in Teacher Education

A case of physics faculty engaging in pedagogical sense-making

“…First, multiple faculty participants are evaluating instruction and providing pedagogical justifications to support their evaluation. Most faculty notice aspects of and make evaluative statements about the TA's instructional moves, such as, "I like the way Levi..." (9), "one thing I really appreciated..." (11), and "we noticed that what was also good about the TA..." (12). Several faculty notice and praise the fact that the TA does not say anything when he first sits down with the students, and instead waits until they ask a question (2,4,11,12).…”

“…For example, faculty C suggests that students may not recognize each other's expertise because of the way they choose to interact with each other (6). Faculty D notices when another student says very little (9), and identifies a specific instructional move on the part of the TA ("You seem to disagree, to what do you disagree?") that may have ameliorated this collaboration challenge.…”

“…From our data set, this session struck us as exemplary and we sought to externalize what impressed us about it. In our analysis, we draw on literature on effective teacher conversations [8,9] and take into account key features of students' scientific sense-making [23,24]. In this paper, we ask: In what ways are faculty engaging in pedagogical sense-making, and what structural features might be supporting or sustaining this engagement?…”

“…The change approach of "developing reflective teachers" is better suited for these goals [2]. At the K-12 level, scholars have proposed clear visions for quality science teaching which involve teachers: noticing and attending to the substance of students' ideas [4][5][6][7], evaluating instructional choices based on concrete observations of classroom events or specific hypothetical scenarios, and linking instructional choices to education research principles [8,9]. Scholars have also proposed designs for K-12 teacher PD experiences that would support these visions [10].…”

Pedagogical sensemaking or “doing school”: In well-designed workshop sessions, facilitation makes the difference

“…Sandoval's framework [27] brings learners' interactions to the foreground, which closely aligns with our theoretical commitments and counteracts a common (sometimes practically motivated) tendency to attempt to directly link embodiment to outcomes. While it is relatively rare for teacher PD research to follow a similar analytical logic to what Sandoval [27] proposes, some examples, largely in K-12 contexts, do exist [40,[46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55]. For example, Horn and Little [46] identify sharp differences in the productivity of two teacher workgroups' conversational routines (what Sandoval [27] would call mediating processes), and hypothesize that these differences are linked to three key structural factors present in one group but not the other.…”