Science Teacher Readiness for Developing 21st Century Skills.
This chapter addresses the workshop guiding questions focusing on science teachers: What is known about how prepared science teachers are to help students develop 21st century skills? What new models of teacher education may support effective teaching and student learning of 21st century skills, and what evidence (if any) is available about the effectiveness of these models? It summarizes a commissioned paper addressing these questions and the following discussion.
HOW TEACHER EDUCATION WILL HAVE TO EVOLVE.
Mark Windschitl (University of Washington) presented a paper on science teacher readiness for cultivating 21st century skills (Windschitl, 2009). He opened with a comparison between the learning goals of reform in science teaching and the learning goals of 21st century skills, suggesting that most of the latter can be taught in the context of scientific inquiry or project-based learning. However, achieving this potential will require “ambitious” teaching, which:
• features learning how to solve problems in collaboration with others;
• engages students in productive metacognitive strategies about their own learning;
• places some learning decisions and activities in the hands of students that were formerly determined by the teacher; and
• depends for success on monitoring of student thinking about complex problems and relies on ongoing targeted feedback to students.
Windschitl warned that this type of ambitious teaching is unlike instruction in which most teachers have participated or even witnessed. Past efforts to reform teaching have had only a “modest track record,” he said, and the broad trends in science classrooms today suggest that improvements are needed. Classes often focus on activity rather than sense-making discourse (Roth and Garnier, 2006, 2007; Weiss et al., 2003); teachers rarely press students for explanations, use questioning effectively, or take into account students’ prior knowledge (Baldi et al., 2007; Banilower et al., 2008).
In the face of these disturbing trends, Windschitl said, it is important to consider what the research tells us about how teachers learn to teach science. First, content knowledge is very important, and is related to student learning (Magnusson et al., 1992). Teachers with strong content knowledge are more likely to teach in ways that help students construct knowledge, pose appropriate questions, suggest alternative explanations, and propose additional inquiries (Alonzo, 2002; Brickhouse, 1990; Gess-Newsome and Lederman, 1995; Lederman, 1999; Roehrig and Luft, 2004; Sanders, Borko, and Lockard, 1993). Second, he said, preservice teachers come into preparation with deeply engrained theories about what counts as good teaching and what counts as learning. These theories can be resistant to change and may filter out learning of new approaches to science instruction, unless teacher educators surface the theories and work actively to counter them.
Model Teacher Preparation, Induction, and Professional Development Programs
Teacher preparation programs capable of addressing these learning challenges have several characteristics, Windschitl said. They center on a common core curriculum grounded in substantial knowledge of child or adolescent development, learning, and subject-specific pedagogy. They provide students with extended opportunities to practice under the guidance of mentors (student teaching), lasting at least 30 weeks, that reflect the program’s vision of good teaching and are interwoven with course work. Short-term interventions have shown little capacity to change teacher preconceptions (Wideen, Mayer-Smith, and Moon, 1998), but longer term approaches that explicitly seek to elicit and work with novice teachers’ initial beliefs have shown some success in fostering reform-based teaching (Fosnot, 1996; Graber, 1996;Windschitl and Thompson, 2006). Other characteristics of effective teacher preparation programs include extensive use of case study methods, teacher research, performance assessments, and portfolio examinations that relate teachers’ learning to classroom practice (Darling-Hammond, 1999).
In their first two years on the job, new teachers often are caught up in a frantic cycle of planning, teaching, and grading, with the result that they often shelve advanced teaching strategies developed in their teacher preparation programs. Windschitl said that induction programs can counter this cycle, providing an excellent opportunity to maintain a focus on 21st century skills in collaborative professional settings. One of the most promising practices for both induction and professional development involves bringing teachers together to analyze samples of student work, such as drawings, explanations, essays, or videotaped classroom dialogues. Based on principled analyses of how students are responding to instruction, the teachers change their instructional approaches. This collaborative analysis of evidence of student learning is used in several Asian nations whose students perform very well in international comparisons of mathematics and science achievement (Lewis and Tsuchida, 1997; Ma, 1999; Marton and Tsui, 2004; Yoshida, 1999).
Windschitl then identified several features of professional development that can support reform-based teaching and teacher understanding of how to cultivate 21st century skills:
• Active learning opportunities focusing on science content, scientific practice, and evidence of student learning (DeSimone et al., 2002);
• Coherence of professional development with teachers’ existing knowledge, other development activities, existing curriculum, and standards in local contexts (DeSimone et al., 2002; Garet et al., 2001);
• The collective development of an evidence-based “inquiry stance” by participants toward their practice (Blumenfeld et al., 1991);
• The collective participation by teachers from the same school, grade, or subject area (DeSimone et al., 2002); and
• The importance of time needed for planning and enacting new practice.
Windschitl clarified that coherence with existing knowledge does not mean tailoring instruction to what teachers already know, but rather taking into account their deeply engrained theories about “good” teaching and learning. There is a broad consensus in the research, he said, that “reform-oriented” professional development (activities such as teacher study groups) results in more substantive changes in practice than “traditional” professional development (workshops or college courses) (Loucks-Horsley et al., 1998; Putnam and Borko, 2000). He then summarized his recommendations for teacher preparation, induction, and professional development (see Table 6-1).
TABLE 6-1
Supports for the Teaching of 21st Century Skills.
Turning to his own research, Windschitl said the goal of the Teachers Learning Trajectory Initiative is to create systems capacity for continuous improvement in teachers’ ability to foster 21st century skills. To learn more about how novices become experts, his research team followed 15 teachers for 3 to 4 years, through their preservice preparation and into their first or second year of teaching. In the preparation program, the future teachers were instructed in reform-based teaching, and, once on the job, they participated in an induction program focusing on review and analysis of student work. Over the course of the study, about one-third of the teachers developed “expert-like” teaching practice.
Windschitl reported that, when his team developed some “rudimentary tools” to assist the novice teachers, they were amazed at how well they improved their instruction (Windschitl, Thompson, and Braaten, 2009). The researchers hypothesized that the widespread use of the tools was attributable to the fact that they were tailored specifically to the needs of novices for planning, teaching, and assessment. For example, they observed that teachers were giving an assessment tool directly to their students to use in classroom conversations. It appeared that the teachers saw value in the tool and thought students could themselves benefit from it, by using the language in the tool to make their own judgment of their personal levels of explanation. This observation led the team to recognize that well-structured tools, especially those acting in a coherent system of support for ambitious teaching, could be very valuable. Based on this new understanding, the team was funded by the National Science Foundation to develop such a system of tools.1 Windschitl described the new suite of tools as follows:
1. Video-enhanced learning progressions for teachers, incorporating specific techniques of high-quality science instruction. For example, one tool illustrates three levels of increasing sophistication in the technique of pressing students for the evidence supporting their explanations.
2. “Big idea” tools, which help teachers take many different ideas presented in the curriculum and reconstruct them around a few big ideas. These tools could help foster nonroutine problem solving.
3. Rubrics to help teachers imagine certain kinds of student performance and to assess students’ thinking, which was listed as a criterion in the rubric.
4. A suite of discourse tools to support teachers in developing complex communication skills. Windschitl described these tools as especially valuable in light of findings from the longitudinal study that teachers struggle with classroom discourse. One tool presents strategies to elicit students’ initial hypotheses about important scientific ideas. Another focuses on ways to engage students in sense-making reflection on activities, and a third demonstrates how to press students for evidence-based explanations.
5. A set of tools and routines for teachers to use in collaboratively analyzing the effectiveness of their instruction, based on evidence of student learning.
Windschitl the