Kathleen Smith

Facilitating Change in Science Teachers’ Perceptions About Learning and Teaching

The STaL (Science Teaching and Learning) project is a year-long Professional Learning project that has been continuously conducted in the state of Victoria (Australia) since 2005. STaL is designed to purposely place teachers in the position of learners of science in ways intended to lead them to reconsider their existing practice and to begin to reconceptualize their teaching through a serious focus on student learning. The final day of STaL is a case-writing day and, over the years, more than 200 cases have been written by teachers in the program. This chapter uses these cases as a data source for secondary analysis of insights into learning about science. The analysis illustrates how teachers’ understanding of their changes in their practice has led to recognizable shifts in the manner in which they conceptualise the ways their students learn about and understand science. With student learning as the cohering theme for analysis, data about passive learning, conditions for learning, and changes in the nature of learning stand out as major issues for the science teacher authors. This analysis is used to illustrate how teachers’ knowledge of practice is shaped when a clear and strong focus on student learning is at the heart of their professional learning.

The Role of Values in Teaching and Learning Science

Abstract This chapter explores the nature of science and different values that underpin science as a way of thinking and acting. While teachers and learners can interpret values differently, the focus of this chapter will be on: Building a shared understanding of values and how they may manifest in the science classroom; How such a shared understanding can be developed in teachers through professional learning opportunities; How professional learning involves experiencing reaching consensus from positions of difference and looks at the role this plays in new scientific knowledge being accepted; How values might be embedded in teaching and learning of science and the implications of this for teaching a diversity of students. Teacher reflections captured in the form of cases provide various examples which identify what inclusive practices might look like in primary and secondary classrooms.

Learning to Teach Science as Inquiry: Developing an Evidence-Based Framework for Effective Teacher Professional Development

In this chapter, we provide promising examples of professional development (PD) programmes for teachers targeted at using inquiry-based approaches. This chapter summarises a symposium at the 2011 ESERA involving researchers from Europe, North America, Australia and Asia. Two main questions guided the discussion: (1) What are your views for supporting teachers in carrying out inquiry in the science classroom? (2) What is the evidence for effective strategies of supporting teachers in learning to teach science as inquiry? Taken together, these studies demonstrate that science teachers’ professional learning is effectively supported by providing opportunities to experiment with new teaching approaches in their classroom, sometimes in combination with authentic experiences to learn science (i.e. scientific inquiry) and to reflect on these experiences, both individually and collectively.

Teacher Self-Directed Learning: Further Insights

This chapter reiterates the benefits of in-service education opportunities that actively position teachers as self-directed learners. Creating the conditions for such learning is a worthwhile and productive pursuit which requires teachers and facilitators to invest a high level of intellectual engagement as they find ways to think and work differently. The professional knowledge which emerges from the experience should be valued at both a school and sector level. Realizing this type of teacher learning is possible, to do so requires professional learning to be less about the construction of a ‘programme’ and more about conceptualizing a process of learning.

Teacher Decision Making: Teacher Learning

This chapter provides insights into the nature of teacher learning, in particular the thinking and actions that characterise teacher self-directed learning. The chapter illustrates that when teachers are supported to work as self-directed learners, they are allowed to work in very different ways to accepted PD experiences. In these conditions, it becomes possible to capture changes in teacher thinking and actions over time revealing the tacit knowledge of practice that teachers use everyday. This knowledge becomes explicit in ways which illustrate how such thinking shapes teachers’ practice and how they make sense of their experiences to construct professional knowledge.

The Teacher Perspective: The Value and Impact of Learning Experiences

This chapter provides insight into three key learning experiences that teachers valued as they worked as self-directed learners: guest speakers, talking with other teachers and reflection. The chapter also identifies why and how these particular experiences impacted teacher thinking and action, in particular how these experiences enabled teachers to develop self-efficacy, align reasoning with action and value their own expertise.

PD and PL: Navigating the Divide

This chapter outlines the conceptual framework underpinning this research and pays particular attention to the theoretical difference between professional development and professional learning. A theoretical dichotomy is used as a rhetorical device to explain these differing positions. This chapter explains that common approaches to professional development tend to reflect assumptions about the nature of teacher learning, where teachers are actively positioned to be passive recipients of external expertise. Alternative assumptions acknowledge teachers’ capacity to become active decision makers about personal learning, actively seeking to place teachers and their context, as central to the learning experience. Such assumptions, it is argued, capture the intention of that which comprises the notion of professional learning.

Programme Operational Features Enabling Teachers to Be Active Decision Makers

This chapter identifies the operational features of the in-service programme that actively positioned teachers to make decisions about what really mattered to them for their personal professional learning. Data analysis revealed deliberate approaches to programme design influenced the nature of programme operations and these approaches became distinctive attributes or features of the programme. These features are discussed at length in this chapter in terms of how each acted as catalysts, stimulating a change in teacher thinking and/or behaviour. Collectively these features were interdependent conditions of an overall strategy designed to actively position teachers as self-directed learners. Under these conditions, teachers demonstrated an increasing sense of professional identity, articulated personal principles of professional practice and actively worked through a process of aligning personal professional reasoning with action and recognised the importance of their emerging expertise. Teachers working in these conditions demonstrated specific thinking and action that came to define the nature of the learning they were experiencing. This learning embodied an interconnection of various dimensions of practice: personal, interpersonal, contextual and technical.

Implications for Approaches to Teacher Learning

This chapter explores the implications of this type of professional learning for sectors and schools. The knowledge that teachers develop about their professional practice could be used by schools to shape and guide effective school-based leadership; however, there appears to be little opportunity for such application to occur at the school level – or more widely beyond programme cohorts. As such, this situation raises important considerations about what it might mean to value teachers as professionals in ways that recognise and meaningfully employ their developing professional knowledge and expertise.

Sowing the Seeds for Potential Growth

This chapter explores literature that sheds light on the thinking and action that has traditionally framed approaches to teacher professional development. A review of relevant research highlights the limitations of these practices in terms of producing meaningful teacher learning and sustainable educational change. This carries implications in terms of the effectiveness of such approaches to address the nature of teacher learning – in particular the complex interrelatedness between teaching, thinking, experience, context and action. This chapter then explores an alternative role of the teacher in the learning process by examining three key ideas emerging from literature in the area of professional learning: (1) professional learning must be personal; (2) it must be about noticing; and (3) it inevitably challenges teachers because it involves hard work. This chapter then explores the literature which frames some important considerations around the ownership of expert knowledge, in particular teachers’ professional knowledge of practice and the value and place of this expertise in teacher education. The chapter concludes with a call for more research into the operational conditions conducive to meaningful teacher learning.