Promoting cognitive and social aspects of inquiry through classroom discourse

We investigated how Chinese physics teachers structured classroom discourse to support the cognitive and social aspects of inquiry-based science learning. Regarding the cognitive aspect, we examined to what extent the cognitive processes underlying the scientific skills and the disciplinary reasoning behind the content knowledge were taught. Regarding the social aspect, we examined how classroom discourse supported student learning in terms of students' opportunities to talk and interaction patterns. Our participants were 17 physics teachers who were actively engaged in teacher education programs in universities and professional development programs in local school districts. We analyzed one lesson video from each participating teacher. The results suggest both promises and challenges. Regarding the cognitive aspect of inquiry, the teachers in general recognized the importance of teaching the cognitive processes and disciplinary reasoning. However, they were less likely to address common intuitive ideas about science concepts and principles. Regarding the social aspect of inquiry, the teachers frequently interacted with students in class. However, it appeared that facilitating conversations among students and prompting students to talk about their own ideas are challenging. We discuss the implications of these findings for teacher education programs and professional development programs in China.     

Intentional Online Discussions in Teacher Education

The goal of a creating civil discourse in teacher education deeply intersects with the ways that students interact in online discussions. However, as discussion shifts to online formats, digital misinformation is becoming widespread and threatens critical and civil communication as cognitive biases emerge in dialogue. The purpose of this case study research was to explore the participants' perceptions of growth and pitfalls while using the six essential elements of an online discussion typology developed as a pedagogical intervention to increase critical thinking and civility in discourse. The findings suggested that participants' responses in online discussions implied some cognitive biases and those participants engaged most often in discussions that were safe, comfortable, and familiar. Nevertheless, in their metacognitive reflections on the typology, participants demonstrated awareness of how these tendencies toward cognitive comfort shortchanged discussions and potential opportunities to develop new perspectives.     

Changing roles and identities in the construction of a community of mathematical inquiry

In the current shifts in mathematics classrooms, teachers are challenged to use effective pedagogy to develop inquiry communities in which all participants are offered opportunities to engage in the reasoning discourse of proficient mathematical practices. The challenge for teachers is to know how to implement these pedagogical changes. This article outlines how a teacher and researcher worked together in a collaborative partnership using a purposely designed communication and participation framework as a tool to scaffold development of collective reasoning in the inquiry community. The findings illustrate the interconnections between the teacher’s beliefs, past experiences, and current, and future expectations for her diverse students. Explanations are provided of how different, often conflicting, voices emerged including one that drew on the teacher’s cultural knowledge. This provided many learning opportunities for the researcher as the teacher developed her students’ voices in culturally appropriate ways.     

The Interplay of Teacher and Student Actions in the Teaching and Learning of Geometric Proof

Proof and reasoning are fundamental aspects of mathematics. Yet, how to help students develop the skills they need to engage in this type of higher-order thinking remains elusive. In order to contribute to the dialogue on this subject, we share results from a classroom-based interpretive study of teaching and learning proof in geometry. The goal of this research was to identify factors that may be related to the development of proof understanding. In this paper, we identify and interpret students' actions, teacher's actions, and social aspects that are evident in a classroom in which students discuss mathematical conjectures, justification processes and student-generated proofs. We conclude that pedagogical choices made by the teacher, as manifested in the teacher's actions, are key to the type of classroom environment that is established and, hence, to students' opportunities to hone their proof and reasoning skills. More specifically, the teacher's choice to pose open-ended tasks (tasks which are not limited to one specific solution or solution strategy), engage in dialogue that places responsibility for reasoning on the students, analyze student arguments, and coach students as they reason, creates an environment in which participating students make conjectures, provide justifications, and build chains of reasoning. In this environment, students who actively participate in the classroom discourse are supported as they engage in proof development activities. By examining connections between teacher and student actions within a social context, we offer a first step in linking teachers' practice to students' understanding of proof.     

Examining the Tasks of Teaching When Using Students' Mathematical Thinking

Recent research suggests that the examination of students' work may lead to changes in teaching practice that are more effective in terms of students' mathematical learning. However, the link between the examination of students' work and the teachers' actions in the classroom is largely unexamined, particularly at the secondary level. In this paper, I present the results of a study in which teachers had extensive opportunities to examine the development of students' conceptual models of exponential growth in the context of their own classrooms. I describe two related aspects of the practice of one teacher: (a) how she listened to students' alternative solution strategies and (b) how she responded to these strategies in her practice. The results of the analysis suggest that as the teacher listened to her students, she developed a sophisticated schema for understanding the diversity of student thinking. The actions of the teacher supported extensive student engagement with the task and led the students to revise and refine their own mathematical thinking. This latter action reflects a significant shift in classroom practice from the role of the teacher as evaluator of student ideas to the role of students as self-evaluators of their emerging ideas.     

Going beyond textbooks: a study on seamless science inquiry in an upper primary class

This paper reports an initial study on investigating inquiry-based learning in science in an upper primary class guided by an inquiry-based learning model in a seamless learning environment. Two questions are addressed: (1) how students advanced their domain knowledge?; and (2) how students developed their inquiry skills? One teacher and 27 Grade-four students from a local primary school were involved in the study. Six inquiry-based learning lessons focusing on a scientific “rustproofing” learning unit were conducted in a seamless learning environment, initiated in a digital classroom and extended to online discussions on a social network platform. Qualitative data were collected and analysed over two weeks. The results show ways that the students advanced their domain knowledge and developed their inquiry skills.     

教师的创造性内隐观及其对教师培训的启示

教师的教育观念,尤其是教师的创造性内隐观在教师实施创造教育的过程中扮演着关键性角色。本文从内隐理论的角度出发综述了教师关于创造性、创造型学生特征和对学生创造性培养的观念,并在此基础上浅谈教师的创造性内隐观对教师培训的启示。     

Student teachers' subject matter knowledge within the domain of area measurement

This paper describes a research project whose major aim was to evaluate first-year teacher education students' understanding of subject matter knowledge in the domain of area measurement. In contrast to many previous approaches to evaluating teacher education students' subject matter knowledge, the approach adopted in this study not only focused on the student teachers' substantive knowledge but also on their knowledge about the nature and discourse of mathematics, their knowledge about mathematics in society and their dispositions towards mathematics. To this end, each student was clinically interviewed whilst engaged on a set of eight tasks that were developed for the study. The development of the tasks was a major component of the study and this is described in detail. The results of the tasks are given and the paper concludes with a discussion of the findings. This discussion focuses primarily on the implications that these results have for preservice mathematics education courses.     

Learning to talk the educational psychology talk through a problem-based course

A sociocultural view of learning proposes that learning involves becoming enculturated into a community of practice. A step along the way is learning to use the specialized language of such a community, as language is a crucial tool that regulates participation, mediates cognition and plays a central role in the development of thought. Problem-based learning (PBL), with its emphasis on collaborative discourse, provides opportunities for students to develop the conceptual language of a discipline, which in turn affects cognition. In a problem-based undergraduate Educational Psychology course, many psychological theories, concepts and principles are introduced to pre-service teachers. During the course, as students learn through problem solving, they engage with new knowledge. This evolving knowledge requires new discourse structures that will allow students to express their new ideas and that will ultimately structure students' ways of knowing. The content of group and individual artifacts is analyzed to examine how PBL influences students' language and knowledge development over the course of the semester in an Educational Psychology class (n = 34). The goal of this paper is to present these analyses and to discuss how the change affects students' language and knowledge.     

“To make the tacit explicit”: Teacher education, emerging discourse, and conceptions of teaching

The influence of teacher education on teaching is a problematic area, both in practice and in research. Often, because much research adopts a “first-order” perspective which focuses on teachers' behaviors, influences of teacher education are seen as temporary, negligible, or difficult to determine. The study reported here grew out of a general concern to document, via a “second-order” perspective which examines their thinking and perceptions, how teachers modify or improve what they do through formal teacher education. It addresses three important areas which have received little attention in recent research: foreign language teaching, in-service graduate education, and the role of a shared, professional discourse in developing teachers' conceptions of teaching. The paper presents a summary of the findings of an 18-month longitudinal study which examined how foreign language teachers' conceptions of their classroom practice developed as they took part in an in-service teacher education program. The paper discusses how the program's shared professional discourse contributes to increasing the complexity of the teachers' thinking about their teaching and suggests that as they learn to articulate their de facto ways of thinking in the shared discourse, the teachers gain greater control over their classroom practice and are thus more able to shape it to their own ends.     

Student-teachers’ Dialectically Developed Motivation for Promoting Student-led Science Projects

School science systems tend to emphasize teaching and learning about achievements of science (such as laws and theories) at the expense of providing students with opportunities to develop realistic conceptions about science and science inquiry and expertise they could use to conduct their own science inquiry projects. Among reasons for such an emphasis, teachers’ lack of experiences with realistic science inquiry appears to be particularly problematic. Accordingly, we engaged student-teachers in a university-based course that attempted to balance instruction about science and science inquiry with student-teachers’ own theorization about science and science inquiry. Qualitative data collected mainly from nine student-teachers in four focus groups indicate that these student-teachers’ motivation for promoting student-led science inquiry projects in schools significantly increased by the end of the course. Analyses suggest that this outcome was influenced by changes in their conceptions about the nature of science, changes in how they associated science inquiry with student learning, and the inductive-deductive dialectic immersion that was built into their pre-service methods course. Implications of these findings for science teacher education are explored in this paper.     

关于英语精读课教师提问与学生反馈的研究--以中国地质大学（北京）外语系为例

本研究采用定性和定量相结合的方法,通过对中国地质大学（北京）英语专业某班进行课堂录音和学生访谈,从课堂提问分类、学生对不同类型提问的应答参与度以及不同类型提问对学生语言输出的影响这三个方面,对英语精读课教师提问与学生反馈的状况进行了研究。基于研究结果,笔者提出了一些提高课堂提问效果的建议。     

Transforming critical and participative teacher research into communicative action: a possible direction for teacher professional learning

ABSTRACT

This paper is an account of how a group of Japanese English language teachers, who questioned current teacher professional education and English language education reforms, learnt to challenge the dominant discourse and find ways of conducting more democratic teacher professional education. It describes how those teachers, including the author, generated a collective theory on communicative competence through the process of their inquiry. It explains how they came to appreciate the action research methodology used for this study, grounded in reflective practice, which in turn helped to develop the author’s understanding of second person action research. It also tells how the teachers learnt to take the initiative in communicating the thinking which informed their practices to others and began to engage in ‘communicative action’ As a result of these outcomes, the paper suggests a potential new form of teacher professional learning aimed towards more democratic relationships between participants. It is hoped that the implications of the research findings could contribute to broader discussions about policy pertaining to teacher professional development.     

Positioning participation in the NGSS era: What counts as success?

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) strives to shift science learning from the teacher as a single cognitive agent, to a classroom community in which participants are working together in directing the classroom's communal knowledge to figure out questions about how phenomena occur, and building, testing, and refining their ideas to address those questions. To achieve this type of classroom environment, teachers should attend to students' knowledge and ideas and pay attention to how students are located within teacher-led interactions, such as being positioned as active discussants or designated listeners. In this study, we explore if and how this is occurring in the NGSS era. We used a naturalistic inquiry to explore how an experienced first-grade teacher used a new NGSS-aligned unit that called for students to use the science and engineering practices (SEP) to build content knowledge. We used a macro-analytic lens to answer the research question “how are class discussions shaped to address the SEP”? We used a micro-analytic lens to answer the research question “how are students positioned during these science discussions in this classroom?” Evidence suggests that the teachers' whole class discussions incorporated and involved the SEP which were specified in the unit lessons for content learning. However, on a micro-analytic level, we found that few students were positioned as active discussants. The teacher heavily relied on those students who could provide succinct and clearly relevant answers while positioning the remainder of the students as silent spectators. Implications from this research suggest that not only new NGSS curriculum materials need to focus on what students should know and do but they also need to address heuristics for teachers that show them how to position all of their students as active doers of science so all students have opportunities to build deeper, core science knowledge.     

Elementary Teacher Talk in Mathematics Study Groups

In this article, the author examines the character of the conversations generated in an elementary teacher group as they worked on mathematical problems together and analyzed their students' work. Two distinct forms of talk — exploratory and expository — were found. The first type of talk occurred most prominently when discussions centered on the teachers' own mathematical work and the second type when conversations centered on that of their students. By examining closely the few occasions when the groups' expository talk turned exploratory, the author explores how both the nature of the tasks and the range and type of facilitator conversational strategies can play significant roles in promoting and interrupting these conversational patterns to educational ends.     

Attitudes toward teachers as a function of student academic self-concept

The evaluative dimensions students used in assessing their academic self-concept were correlated with judgmental dimensions students utilized in evaluating teachers by means of a stepwise multiple regression analysis. All students evaluated themselves as students in terms of academic skill and ability, interpersonal effectiveness, and quality of scholastic involvement. College students also evaluated themselves on self-confidence and style of intellectual inquiry, while high school students evaluated themselves on their tolerance. All students judged teachers on the dimensions of student/teacher rapport, communicative style, instructional style, and stimulation. Dimensions of student academic self-concept were significantly related to students' judgments of teaching: student interpersonal effectiveness was found to be the most significant overall predictor of high school students' attitudes toward teachers, whereas a student's assessment of his academic abilities was the major predictive variable among college students. Student sex was not a significant predictor of students' attitudes toward teachers except for the dimension of student/teacher rapport among college students, with females rating teachers significantly higher on this dimension than males.     

Two Teachers' Conceptions of a Reform-Oriented Curriculum: Implications for Mathematics Teacher Development

This paper describes two high school teachers' conceptions of the cooperation and exploration components of a reform-oriented mathematics curriculum. Although the teachers appreciated the themes of cooperation and exploration in theory, their conceptions of these themes with respect to their implementations of the curriculum differed. One teacher viewed the curriculum's problems as open-ended and challenging for students, whereas the other teacher claimed that the problems were overly structured. Each teacher attributed difficulties with students' cooperative work to the amount of structure and direction (too little or too much) offered by the problems. Discussion of such similarities and differences in the teachers' conceptions emphasizes the dynamic, humanistic nature of curriculum implementation and gives rise to important implications for mathematics teacher development in the context of reform. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.