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When the beginning science teacher asked her students why humans have opposable thumbs, most responded simply “to manipulate things.” She was disappointed that they didn’t dig deeper into the question, push for more elaborate explanations of evolutionary mechanics. She took samples of the students’ work to a collaborative discussion group at the University of Washington to analyze what went wrong.

Her peers — also recent graduates of the UW teacher education program — helped her construct a more challenging question, one that dug for deeper levels of meaning with the addition of a few words. The revised question: “Why do you think humans have an opposable thumb and other species don’t?”

The brainstorming novices were part of a structured intellectual forum inspired by data showing that new teachers need additional support once they step off campus and into the classroom. Although induction (support provided during the early years of teaching) has traditionally been assigned to school districts, faculty in the UW teacher education program recognized that they needed to provide on-going support to their graduates if the new teachers were to become sufficiently skilled to meet the needs of all their students.

“New teachers need as much help and support in the first year or two as they did during the preparation program itself,” says UW associate professor Mark Windschitl, who is working with post-doctoral researcher Jessica Thompson and doctoral student Melissa Braaten to investigate the efficacy of their induction model for beginning science teachers.

“One thing we realized from our research is that beginning science teachers often know how to start an instructional conversation with students, they may even know where they would like it to end up, but they have no idea how to sustain that conversation in the middle, where kids make sense of ideas for themselves,” says Windschitl.

The new science teachers, who all enter the UW graduate program with bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering areas, come back to campus regularly during their first years of full-time practice. Group sessions center on examining and analyzing student work from their classrooms: homework assignments, written responses to problems, drawings, videotaped conversations.

Together, the new teachers and their UW mentors probe and poke, ponder and problem-solve. Why did students ignore an important scientific concept in explaining a particular experiment? How could teachers make students dive deeper for “big ideas” in an experiment? Why didn’t the students use data effectively to back up their claims? Why did a teacher’s lesson help only high achievers in the classroom and leave other students behind?

While at the UW, all the new teachers learn methods of ambitious science teaching, instructional techniques that encourage students to engage deeply with science concepts. All have intensive training in assessing student work for evidence of student thinking. So all have a common vocabulary in this new discussion forum to negotiate and solve shared problems of practice.

The collective conversations among these beginners have the power to shape their views of themselves, their students and their teaching.

“Making your teaching public and available for critique is a necessary step for improvement of practice,” says Windschitl, who serves as curriculum and instruction chair at the College of Education. “When examining student work, this improvement of practice is not centered on your behavior as a teacher — it is centered on evidence of learning by your students.”

THE WHAT, THE HOW, THE WHY
The induction sessions are carefully structured, with formal guidelines for conversation and specific criteria aimed at analyzing student work. That analysis progresses from assessing students’ descriptions of what happened to descriptions of how it happened and finally to more sophisticated explanations of why it happened. Work is intended to illustrate students’ understanding of science knowledge as something test-able, revisable and generative.

Beginning teachers collect student work over time from three groups: students who learn easily, students with average learning abilities, and struggling learners. “The teachers put up student work for the year, asking ‘How have my students changed in developing evidence-based scientific explanations?’ “ says Windschitl. “It means assessing your performance as a teacher based on student learning. It’s a system of accountability.”

Initiated in spring of 2007, the induction sessions serve multiple functions. They provide much-needed support for early career science teachers in what is typically a rocky transition from novice to skilled professional work. During this transition, a good percentage of new teachers — overwhelmed by challenges of real classrooms ­— abandon innovative methods learned in teacher preparation programs.

“Our research shows that many teachers, when faced with the complexity of actual professional life, revert back to using the curriculum as given, without trying to adapt it for students as necessary,” says Windschitl. “They need help to maintain a challenging environment for all kids, rather than take the path of least resistance and go with pre-constructed lesson plans that may not meet the needs of all their students.”

The UW induction sessions also supply important — and, in the field, extremely rare — evidence on teacher development. The data, collected through group observation and videotaping, allow faculty members to trace the evolution of their graduates’ classroom practice, examine what confuses new teachers along the way and take a hard look at their own practices on campus.

“We had no idea of how difficult it was for beginning teachers to imagine what young kids are capable of in the classroom and what counts as a scientific explanation,” says Windschitl. “We had no idea how hard it was until we brought them together for induction support.”

In early group sessions, about a third of new teachers insisted their students “didn’t get it’ or “couldn’t get past this misconception,” instead of sharing responsibility for students’ performances. These same teachers tended to be initially satisfied with surface-level scientific descriptions from students and not press for deeper explanations. Many saw learning as something “acquired,” and looked at the analysis of student work as another form of grading.

On the other hand, a number of novices began to develop elements of expert-like teaching. They were more engaged in expanding their students’ thinking than in evaluating their answers. If students partially understood a scientific idea, they saw it as a leverage point for new instructional moves. They engaged in deeper analysis of student work.

Still, even some of these teachers didn’t grasp key concepts. Many had poorly articulated ideas of what words like “scientific explanation,” “inquiry,” and “conclusions” meant. Researchers analyzed these gaps as a means of informing university instruction. “Our own problems of practice became crystal clear to us as a faculty as we analyzed the problems our graduates were having in their own classrooms,” says Windschitl.

AIM HIGHER, LISTEN HARDER

The collaborative groups evolved as part of the College’s larger examination of teacher education, funded through a Teachers for a New Era grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Researchers in the science study posed big questions about early career teachers. How do their reasoning and discussion skills change over time? What conditions support these changes? Is there a way to accelerate their progression from novice to advanced teachers?

It became apparent early in the research that beginning teachers think in unique ways about practice, from selecting what to teach to deciding what counts as learning. Their thinking is substantially different than that of teachers even three to four years out. So how should teacher educators adjust for this? And why haven’t they?

“There is not enough principled instruction in teacher preparation programs simply because we don’t have a sufficient knowledge base on how beginning teachers think and reason about teaching and learning. But as we begin to build this knowledge base, some of the principles by which we should be operating are becoming clearer,” says Windschitl, who, with colleague Thompson, is using a recent National Science Foundation grant to develop a system of tools and tool-based practices for developing science teachers’ expertise. Thompson has, in fact, taken the lesson learned in the induction project and begun the Puget Sound Science Teachers’ Network. Activities include monthly video club meetings for experienced teachers in the region and collaborative working groups in Cleveland and Rainier Beach High Schools (see http://education.washington.edu/areas/ci/research/psst.html).
For too long, he says, teachers have relied on unchallenging classroom strategies — confirmatory lab exercises that point to predetermined outcomes, step-by-step exercises in pre-programmed curricula. “The press for evidence-based explanation almost never happens in science classrooms,” says Windschitl.

In U.S. classrooms, one-third of science lessons focus on activities with no attempt to relate them to fundamental scientific concepts. The results of such instructional choices have been sobering. International comparisons show U.S. students do not reason well about evidence and explanation.

In response to these data, policymakers are beginning to mandate changes. Last year, Washington state adopted a new set of scientific standards that require all students to be able to analyze and understand complex phenomenon, create inquiry activities around scientific ideas and use those ideas to solve real-world problems. The new standards require instructors to teach fewer concepts, more deeply.

If science teaching is to change, the teaching of science teachers also must change – and that should not stop when graduates enter their first jobs, says Windschitl. He calls it not only “professionally prudent” but “morally imperative” to give these early career teachers regular opportunities for collaborative support and disciplined reflection on their practice.

Those opportunities can be transformative, as reports from two years of the induction program illustrate.

Participants, when they heard about student achievements in their peers’ classrooms, began to recalibrate their expectations for their own students. They learned to aim higher and listen harder. Some came to realize that their students might grasp a scientific concept, but were performing poorly on tests and assignments simply because they couldn’t respond to a teacher’s directives.
The group participants grappled with ideas and grew as teachers.

The new science teacher who had asked her students about opposable thumbs began to take on ever more complex teaching practices in her high-needs school. She developed a keen understanding of her students and how to maximize their capabilities, says Windschitl. “She refused to say they were simply not ‘getting it.’ Rather, it was always, ‘What could I be doing differently as a professional, what opportunities am I not providing these students?’ She placed the responsibility on herself.”

By her second year of teaching, this science teacher had taken the lead in organizing all 15 teacher colleagues in her school around their own year-long collaborative examination of student work. Using strategies learned in the university-based sessions, she began introducing her school colleagues to the art of collaboratively critiquing, investigating and continually refining the complicated act of teaching.

It was the ultimate lesson in sharing.

To learn more about the on-going work with new science teachers see:

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