Indeed, minimally the focus group and the experience teaching NOS enabled three
of the teachers to move beyond personal concerns about teaching NOS to concerns
about student learning, as measured by the SoCQ. Angela, Kelly and Holly all
moved toward the ‘improver’ profile, indicating that they had ideas for teaching
NOS beyond what they had learned in their practice or methods course. Despite
that Holly struggled integrating NOS into her teaching, she still exhibited a NOS concerns
profile that indicated she had many ideas for teaching NOS and in fact, the ideas
went beyond what she had learned in her methods class. It would be interesting to
follow Holly beyond her internship to see whether she integrates NOS into her own
classroom science teaching now that she is no longer an intern. Phyllis and Madge,
who were co-teaching, both held personal concerns of being ‘worried/cooperator’
regarding NOS instruction at the end of their internship. These two were the only
ones who were co-teaching and the only ones designing their own unit from scratch
(e.g. not using FOSS). Perhaps it was very difficult to co-teach, design rather than
adapt a unit that embeds NOS, and be in a classroom of 40 young children, and
that contributed to them maintaining their ‘worried’ profile. It would be an interesting
follow-up to see how they fared in future teaching settings.
Recommendations/Limitations
Regarding science teacher education, it seems imperative that new teachers have some
support in developing NOS instruction as part of their science instruction. It seems
crucial to find or develop a way to support preservice teachers in their endeavors to
teach NOS. The CoP explored in this paper provided such a venue for these particular
preservice teachers to share ideas and gain support for NOS teaching despite being in
classrooms where the cooperating teachers did not know or teach NOS. However, the
researchers acknowledge that this was a small group of preservice teachers, and it
would take greater effort and likely more time to develop a CoP with a larger class
of students. Working with one small group of preservice teachers enabled us to
explore a CoP on a smaller scale, yet was a limitation in this study because we do
not know how this same type of CoP may have worked for all preservice teachers in
our course. These preservice teachers were volunteers who wanted support with
their teaching. It is not possible to tell how the CoP would work with those who
did not want support in their teaching of science or specifically, their teaching of NOS.
However, methods’ instructors need to consider ways to develop such a CoP within
in their courses or within field experiences. A recommendation for developing a CoP
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within a whole class group would be to break the class down into smaller working
groups, either by grade level or by placement schools. In this way, smaller CoPs
could develop within the larger group, as has been found successful with developing
CoPs with inservice teachers (Akerson, Cullen, et al., 2009). From work with inservice
teachers, it seems that a team of approximately 4–5 paired with a university NOS
support person was successful in developing a CoP that supported NOS teaching. A
similar ratio could be explored with preservice teachers. Of course, other methods of
supporting NOS instruction could be equally or more successful, and CoPs should be
explored in light of other methods, such as field-based NOS courses. However, from
our results it seems that CoPs, or some way to support the preservice teacher, are critical
when preservice teachers are placed with cooperating teachers who do not understand
nor teach NOS. Methods’ instructors could consider having faculty-led
meetings with their preservice teachers who are in the field, or embedding this kind
of CoP structure into existing student teaching seminar courses. Additionally, an
on-line version of a CoP could be explored to alleviate struggles of trying to meet
with groups of preservice teachers. The on-line venue could be used to allow preservice
teachers to hold virtual conversations as they are learning to teach NOS. Future
research should explore these alternatives to determine best approaches to supporting
NOS instruction, whether it be through developing CoPs or other methods.