Sensemaking in Elementary Science

Supporting Teacher Learning

Elizabeth A. Davis, Carla Zembal-Saul, Sylvie M. Kademian, Elizabeth A. Davis, Carla Zembal-Saul, Sylvie M. Kademian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429761195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Grounded in empirical research, this book offers concrete pathways to direct attention towards elementary science teaching that privileges sensemaking, rather than isolated activities and vocabulary. Outlining a clear vision for this shift using research-backed tools, pedagogies, and practices to support teacher learning and development, this edited volume reveals how teachers can best engage in teaching that supports meaningful learning and understanding in elementary science classrooms.

Divided into three sections, this book demonstrates the skills, knowledge bases, and research-driven practices necessary to make a fundamental shift towards a focus on students' ideas and reasoning, and covers topics such as:

• An introduction to sensemaking in elementary science;
• Positioning students at the center of sensemaking;
• Planning and enacting investigation-based science discussions;
• Designing a practice-based elementary teacher education program;
• Reflections on science teacher education and professional development for reform-based elementary science.

In line with current reform efforts, including the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), Sensemaking in Elementary Science is the perfect resource for graduate students and researchers in science education, elementary education, teacher education, and STEM education looking to explore effective practice, approaches, and development within the elementary science classroom.

Section II

Promising Practices, Tools, and Frameworks

7 Approximations of Practice

Scaffolding for Preservice Teachers

Elizabeth A. Davis

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN

Acknowledgments

I appreciate the opportunity to work with my colleagues in the Elementary Science Methods Planning Group and the many preservice teachers who have helped me learn and grow as an elementary science teacher educator over my years at the University of Michigan.

Approximations of Practice: Scaffolding for Preservice Teachers

Teacher educators have traditionally relied on pedagogies of reflection and investigation (Grossman et al., 2009b), and supported beginning teachers in developing an important knowledge base and analytic skills for teaching (Ball and Forzani, 2009). But teaching is interactive, contingent, and intricate (Ball and Forzani, 2009; Grossman et al., 2009a), with students contributing ideas in real time and with teachers needing to support the learning of students with different needs, backgrounds, interests, and experiences. How can they learn to engage in elementary science teaching of the sort described in this volume (e.g., Bismack and Haefner, this volume, Chapter 2; Zembal-Saul and Hershberger, this volume, Chapter 1)?

Pedagogies of practice (Grossman et al., 2009a; or pedagogies of enactment, Grossman et al., 2009b) are teacher education pedagogies (including representations, decompositions, and approximations of practice) that support learning to do the actual work of teaching, centered on developing a set of high-leverage or core teaching practices (e.g., Ball and Forzani, 2009; Windschitl et al., 2012). Practice-based teacher education does not simply increase the time preservice teachers spend in the field. Instead, it is “professional training that attempts to focus novices’ learning more directly on the work of teaching rather than on traditional academic or theoretical topics,” with focus on a set of high-leverage practices drawing on a rich knowledge base (Forzani, 2014, p. 357; Grossman et al., 2009b; Zeichner, 2012). I explore the role approximations of practice can play in scaffolding preservice teachers in learning to teach, with the goal of helping teacher educators design more effective and efficient learning experiences. I use the work of one preservice teacher to illustrate these approximations and how they serve to scaffold.

Theoretical Framework

Teacher learning is situated, social, and distributed; preservice teachers construct knowledge and appropriate practice together with others and through using tools (Putnam and Borko, 2000; Vygotsky, 1978). Preservice teacher learning entails learning to do the practices of teaching that will be used in classrooms; the learning is situated within the profession. Because of the complex nature of those practices, initial work may be more simple and less authentic (e.g., eliciting one child’s ideas before attempting to do so with a whole class of children; cf. Davis, Palincsar, and Kademian, this volume, Chapter 13). Preservice teachers learn with others more knowledgeable than themselves (such as their mentor teachers, field instructors, and other teacher educators) as well as other preservice teachers, so their learning is social. Because learning entails gaining access to and skill in the authentic knowledge and practices of a profession, preservice teachers move toward increasingly authentic teaching experiences, and more knowledgeable others help them learn within those experiences. Preservice teacher learning is distributed across these communities of practice or social systems and across tools that support their performance. Through supporting situated, social, and distributed learning of teaching practice, approximations of practice can help preservice teachers learn to teach.

Approximations of practice are “opportunities for novices to engage in practices that are more or less proximal to the practices of a profession” (Grossman et al., 2009a, p. 2058)—for example, teaching a small group of students (see, e.g., Lampert et al., 2013). High-leverage teaching practices that might be worked on through approximations of practice could include eliciting students’ science ideas, leading a whole class discussion, or meeting with a parent (Davis and Boerst, 2014; Kazemi et al., 2009; Grossman et al., 2009b).

Approximations of practice are intended to support preservice teachers in engaging in deliberate practice (Lampert et al., 2013). Deliberate practice refers to the purposeful, effortful activities in which individuals engage with the intent of optimizing their improvement in their performance of an endeavor (Ericsson et al, 1993). Approximations allow learners to experience “instructive failure” (Grossman et al., 2009a, p. 2077)—they allow room for error in a safe, low-stakes environment. The goal is careful attention to and reflection on the particulars of instructional moves in relationship to learners and content.

Based on this description, I argue that approximations of practice serve as scaffolded learning experiences for preservice teachers. Scaffolding—associated with Vygotsky’s (1978) notion of a zone of proximal development and consistent with a view of learning as situated, social, and distributed—implies that given appropriate assistance, a learner can attain a goal or engage in a practice otherwise out of reach (Wood, Bruner, and Ross, 1976). Van de Pol et al. (2010), analyzing the literature on scaffolding, identified categories of scaffolding intentions: support of learners’ (a) metacognitive activity, (b) (socio)cognitive activity,¹ and (c) affect. While these categories—like most such frameworks—are imperfect in that some forms of scaffolding work toward multiple goals, the framework serves as an analytic tool to identify similarities across scaffolding.

Metacognitive scaffolding can include promoting monitoring and helping the learner maintain direction—essentially, helping the learner to continue to focus on and move toward the goal, as well as to articulate their ideas. Sociocognitive scaffolding can involve both conceptual and procedural scaffolding and can include, for example, support that narrows options (in the scaffolding literature, this is referred to as reducing the degrees of freedom, restricting the problem space, and narrowing choices). It also can include helping the learner identify what is important (marking critical features of the task and highlighting the task’s salient features) and providing help (in the form of expert guidance and by highlighting gaps or problems with the understanding or performance). Affective scaffolding can include managing the learner’s frustration (e.g., by calibrating the provision of expert guidance) and creating interest, curiosity, and engagement.

Scaffolding in any of these categories can structure a task—that is, “address the challenges learners face … to make [a task] more tractable” or manageable for learners (Reiser, 2004, p. 274). Reiser continues, “The core idea [of structuring] is that by providing structure or constraints, perhaps in the form of explicit direction or by narrowing choices, the complexity facing the learner is reduced and the problem solving is more tractable” (p. 283). Table 7.1 gives examples of how scaffolding can structure a task for learners (drawing on, e.g., Reiser, 2004; Van de Pol et al., 2010; Wood et al., 1976, and organized using Van de Pol et al.’s framework).

Table 7.1 Examples of Structuring and Problematizing Intentions

	Examples of structuring intentions	Examples of problematizing intentions
Primarily metacognitive scaffolding	Maintaining directionPromoting monitoring	Maintaining direction“Rocking the boat” (Reiser, 2004, p. 288) when students are not being mindful enoughEliciting articulationEliciting decisions
Primarily (socio)cognitive scaffolding (conceptual and procedural)	Reducing the degrees of freedomRestricting the problem spaceNarrowing choicesDecomposing a complex taskHighlighting the salient features of a taskFocusing effortProviding expert guidance	Marking critical features of a taskHighlighting the salient features of a taskHighlighting discrepancies (problems with the “production” or performance)Surfacing gaps and disagreementsFocusing attention on issues that need resolution
Primarily affective scaffolding	Controlling frustration	Creating interestRecruiting learners to the taskEngaging via dissonance or curiosity

Approximations of practice, ideally, structure the task. In learning to teach, the “task” that is being worked on is some aspect of the work of teaching (Ball and Forzani, 2009)—perhaps, a teaching practice or set of practices. Approximations of practice provide structure for this work—for example, through decomposing a practice and highlighting its salient features. Approximations reduce the complexity of the practice or compilation of practices, by foregrounding some aspects of teaching while backgrounding others, while helping the novice to maintain attention on the goal and controlling frustration with teaching’s complexities.

Scaffolding in any of the three categories can also serve to problematize tasks—“to shape tasks for learners in ways that make their problem solving more productive” (Reiser, 2004, p. 274). The goal of this scaffolding mechanism of problematizing is to “guide the learner into facing complexity in the domain that will be productive for learning” (p. 288). In doing so, the support makes the task more complex, more interesting, and non-trivial. Table 7.1 also gives examples of how scaffolding can problematize a task. Not surprisingly, some scaffolding both structures and problematizes.

Approximations of practice can problematize tasks for preservice teachers. They force attention to the important particulars of a teaching practice; highlight ways that the practice, as enacted, is inadequate (e.g., how a closed-ended question shuts down discussion); and support reflection on the enactment.

Structuring and problematizing allow the task—in this case, the new teaching practice—to be worked on in a meaningful and deliberate way. Reiser (2004) describes the need for careful balance between providing assistance, on the one hand, and ensuring that the work on a task is productive for learning, on the other. Eventually, the learner takes more autonomy and the scaffolding fades, and the practice is developed in more authentic contexts.

I outline three examples from the University of Michigan’s elementary science methods class next, to illustrate how teacher educators can design experiences to structure and problematize learning to teach and to increase the effectiveness and the efficiency of our designs.

Practice-Based Experiences: Scaffolding through Structuring and Problematizing

We² have organized a series of practice-based elementary science teaching experiences into three types. These approximations of practice include peer-teaching rehearsal experiences, small-scale field-based teaching experiences, and full teaching experiences. These fall along a rough continuum (see Table 7.2), increasing in both authenticity and complexity (see, e.g., Grossman et al., 2009b; Lampert et al., 2013). By “authentic” I mean close to the genuine work of classroom teaching. By “complexity” I refer to the number and difficulty of teaching moves being managed at once. The peer-teaching rehearsal experiences are least authentic and complex, as well as the most highly scaffolded, whereas the full lessons are most authentic and complex, and the least scaffolded, demonstrating a gradual release of responsibility. Teacher educators likely see aspects of their own instructional approaches reflected here, though the attention may be at a larger grain size, rather than on developing specific high-leverage teaching practices (Zeichner, 2012).

Table 7.2 Continuum of Authenticity and Complexity

	Peer teaching	Small-scale field-based teaching	Full teaching experiences
Level of authenticity	Lowest	Middle	Highest
Level of complexity	Lowest	Middle	Highest

Some empirical work has explored these approximations of practice in the same university context and elsewhere (e.g., Arias, this volume, Chapter 11; Benedict-Chambers, this volume, Chapter 10), and demonstrate how they support situated, social, and distributed learning. This work, complementing the broader literature base, suggests that each approximation has affordances for preservice teachers’ learning. Nelson (2011), for example, found that peer-teaching rehearsals served as existence proofs for preservice teachers, helping them recognize the kinds of science teaching in which they might be able to engage. Benedict-Chambers (2014) noted the importance of roles in peer-teaching rehearsals, describing how acting as a student helped the preservice teachers learn to attend to student thinking. Nelson (2011) found that smal...