Negotiating the Certification-to-Workplace Transition: What Helps Pre-service Middle-School Science Teacher Candidates Bring Responsive Teaching Practices to Their Classrooms?

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

The pre-service teacher certification program for middle school mathematics and science teaching at the University of Maryland, College Park, faces a problem also confronted by other mathematics and science teacher preparation programs. The University's Middle School Mathematics and Science Teacher Certification Program focuses on helping future teachers learn ways to elicit and build upon middle grades students' common-sense knowledge and ways of thinking -- an approach used by exemplary teachers and supported by research about K-12 students' learning. Many of the future teachers buy into this approach to teaching in principle, but once they graduate from the certification program and become professional teachers, many of them rarely if ever approach their teaching in this way. This project explores why this occurs, with the goal of informing modifications to the certification program that could help teachers apply, more frequently and more fully, effective teaching practices learned in their certification program. The project, funded by the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) program and the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship program, will inform improvements not only to the particular teacher preparation program studied in the project but to the hundreds of other programs that emphasize helping future teachers learn similar sets of effective teaching practices. More specifically, the Middle School Teacher Certification Program mentioned above focuses on responsive teaching -- a set of approaches in which teachers consistently notice, attend to, interpret, and respond to the substance (as opposed to just the correctness) of students' ideas and adjust their instruction accordingly. A growing body of research suggests that responsive teaching can help diverse students learn science, and a growing number of teacher education programs are attempting to support novice teachers' responsive teaching practices. To help pre-service teachers (PSTs) learn responsive teaching, the Middle School Teacher Certification Program engages PSTs in pedagogies of practice-based teacher education: PSTs observe models and representations of responsive teaching, they "approximate" responsive teaching by practicing with a classroom of virtual student "avatars," and they enact responsive teaching in lessons in their early field experiences. The goal of this research project is to explore the extent to which PSTs in the program focus on core practices of responsive teaching and enact responsive teaching practices in their student teaching as well as in their first years in the workforce. The project takes a qualitative case study approach, triangulating between cases studies of particular program courses and longitudinal case studies of particular PSTs as they navigate the transition from the program into teaching. The data collected includes video recordings of PSTs engaged in the practice-based pedagogies of the courses, recordings of each PST with the avatars, PSTs' program coursework, interviews with case-study participants, and observations and video recordings of case study participants in their student teaching and in their first year of teaching. This small-N exploratory study helps articulate hypotheses and explanations about preparation for responsive teaching that will inform future large-N multi-institutional research and future design-based research on individual PST programs.