Strategies to support teachers' professional development regarding sense‐making in context‐based science curricula

Abstract

The aim of this study is to develop more understanding about strategies to support teachers' professional development in curriculum innovations, in which pedagogy and content change simultaneously compared to the conventional curriculum. A pre-existing framework, including strategies for professional development, was adapted, implemented, and evaluated from the perspective of teachers' sense-making in teaching context-based science curricula. This framework guides the design of activities that support teachers' development in three new aspects of teaching context-based science units: setting a context in class, performing a new teaching role, and teaching new content. In a case study, six teachers in secondary education participated in a professional development program based on the adapted framework. A qualitative inner-case analysis was conducted to describe teachers' sense-making during the program, in terms of the categories "assimilation," "accommodation," "toleration," and "distantiation." Results showed that teachers participating in the professional development program successfully assimilated and accommodated all three aspects; however, the process of teachers' sense-making of

Exploring Adaptations of the VisChem Approach: Advancements and Anchors toward Particle-Level Explanations

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“…By supporting in-service teachers' actual use of high-quality resources, we can move away from toleration and more toward teacher accommodation. 68 Finally, both practitioners and researchers should work intandem when considering other external factors like extant curricula and their associated pedagogical traditions. Both the tendency to treat models as descriptive tools and the reappropriation of symbol heuristics to explain precipitation disincentivize understanding particle-level processes.…”

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“…Furthermore, the study found out that CPCT needed improvement in their ability to design maritime context-based learning. Several teachers' professional development strategies could be adapted, such as frameworks that entailed setting a context in class, performing a new teaching role, and teaching content [11]. Moreover, an additional project was designed, including teaching an educative context-based unit and designing an outline of a new contextbased unit [12], as illustrated in Table 2.…”

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