Communities Supporting Teacher Learning: Using Videocase Analysis of Teaching and Learning to Support Undergraduate Preservice Secondary Science Teachers

Bscs Science Learning, Colorado Springs CO

Investigators

Abstract

This project seeks to address the conundrum of multiple and inconsistent models of teaching that individuals experience as K-12 students, as undergraduate students in STEM courses, as pre-service teachers in education courses, and when they go into schools and work with cooperating teachers. It is often difficult for pre-service science teachers to know what constitutes best practices for teaching science. These pre-service teachers encounter a wide variation in teaching practices throughout their educational careers, first as students in K-12 classrooms and then in undergraduate STEM courses, as well as in pre-service education courses in which they are confronted with educational theory and practices that are often incongruent with these other two experiences. In the last stage of their undergraduate pre-service teacher preparation, they are placed in schools to begin their internship teaching classes alongside a cooperating teacher, who may not have a teaching and learning philosophy that is consistent with the evidence-based best practices promoted in their pre-service STEM education courses. How are pre-service science teachers expected to develop an effective model for teaching and learning with confounding messages from their experiences? This project will study the effects of developing a strong community of support for pre-service teachers preparing to teach secondary science as they develop a common vision for teaching and learning based on the Science Teachers Learning from Lesson Analysis (STeLLA) Conceptual Framework. The community will include university science faculty, university education faculty, and cooperating teachers that the pre-service teachers encounter along their preparation journey as an undergraduate. The community will apply the STeLLA approach to their own courses that pre-service teachers take as part of their teacher preparation programs. The pre-service teachers in participating universities will receive a consistent message--one that has over a decade of research on the approach. This project will also examine three different instantiations of the model as it is implemented across different universities with secondary pre-service science teachers. It will employ a Videocase Analysis of Teaching and Learning (VATL) model, backed by evidence from the STeLLA approach, for a coherent approach to science teacher preparation. This important work is supported with funding from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program and the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship program. This project builds on a strong line of research dating back to 2004 that studied a successful model of professional learning with elementary teachers and elementary pre-service teachers (STeLLA; Roth et al., 2011; Taylor et al., 2017). This VATL project will leverage and study the STeLLA professional learning model with undergraduate pre-service teachers preparing to teach secondary science. VATL has two key phases. In the first phase, the lead institution engages a community of undergraduate pre-service teacher leaders (university science faculty, university education faculty, and school district cooperating teachers) in developing an understanding of the STeLLA professional development model and creating a shared vision of how to apply the STeLLA model in each of the three university settings. After the first phase, each university will have their own pre-service course built on a shared understanding of the STeLLA model, as well as science and education faculty members incorporating STeLLA approaches in their own teaching in other relevant courses. In the second phase of the project, the community of teacher leaders implements this course at their respective institutions with pre-service teachers. The impact of this new program on pre-service teachers and their students will be studied using a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest control group design. Outcomes for secondary science pre-service teachers include content knowledge (pre and post), ability to code videos for key teaching strategies (pre and post), and classroom practice (post only). The outcome for middle and high school students will be a content knowledge measure (pre and post). Because secondary pre-service science teachers often teach across all science disciplines, the study will include content outcomes across science disciplines. The study will include approximately 66 pre-service secondary science teachers in the quasi-experiment, along with roughly 2,000 middle and high school students in the state of Colorado. This project will inform the community of researchers and educators about the potential efficacy of the highly successful STeLLA professional learning model in a new context: undergraduate secondary pre-service science programs. Research findings will also be able to show how variations on implementation, across three universities in Colorado, may affect the outcomes.