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Much of the work in the Learning Sciences and Computer-Supported Collaborated Learning communities have focused on understanding and designing for learning in collaborative spaces. This work utilizes methods such as Interaction Analysis and has attended to multiple dimensions and timescales of learning. It has redefined ideas about knowledge and competence and how they are acquired, thus providing important insights into the process of learning and the design of learning environments. However, we have not in the same way advanced our knowledge of teacher learning. Our understanding of the process and mechanism of teacher learning in in collaborative professional development (PD) environments is still quite thin. In this paper, we discuss how utilizing methods from Interaction Analysis, in particular, can offer insight into the process of teacher learning in these contexts. We illustrate how adopting a lens that shifts away from asking whether teachers are progressing toward a researcher-defined goal, toward one that asks how learning occurs in the moments of interaction, and the meaning it has for participants as they work to achieve PD goals, has the potential to shed new light on learning in teacher PD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mathematics and science education researchers focused on teacher education emphasize attention and responsiveness to student thinking as central to effective classroom practice. Being responsive to student thinking involves attending to the substance of students' ideas—the meaning students are making—and pursuing that thinking, adjusting the flow of instruction as needed. Yet, attention and responsiveness to student thinking is irregular and generally rare among novice teachers. In this theoretical paper, we argue that the irregularity of attention and responsiveness to student thinking, including variability within individual teachers' practice, can be explained by a framework grounded in teachers' localized framings of their classroom activity—their sense of "what is it that's going on here." Using analyses of classroom episodes across contexts and timescales to illustrate our claims, we demonstrate how a framing-anchored framework can coordinate and improve upon three common explanations for the irregularity of novice teachers' attention and responsiveness to student thinking: underdeveloped skills and/or knowledge for attending and responding, "transmissionist" beliefs about learning, and institutional constraints (and teachers' perceptions thereof). Building on this argument, we suggest that teacher educators can work with novice teachers' framings of their classroom activities as a generative anchor for supporting attention and responsiveness to student thinking in classroom settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efforts toward improving K-12 science education emphasize teachers noticing students' thinking as they engage in disciplinary practices and reasoning. This noticing requires specialized teacher knowledge and skills as it involves attending to students' ideas, as well as making sense of and responding to those ideas so that the disciplinary substance in them is recognized, made explicit, and supported. This study investigates three elementary teachers' in-the-moment noticing of students' ideas while teaching science and their thinking about what it means to engage in this teaching practice. Results indicate that teachers notice many different kinds of student science ideas, and also that teachers have different ways of thinking about which student ideas are substantive during a science lesson. This research contributes to our theoretical understanding of the nature of teacher noticing in science. Noticing students' science ideas involves not only the presence of ideas and the ability to notice them, but also a teacher's understanding of this teaching practice in the moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on the work of teacher noticing, this study investigated teachers’ noticing of students’ thinking evident in artifacts from their science teaching context. Prior work on teachers’ noticing in science has generally focused on noticing students’ thinking surrounding specific disciplinary content. We asked 20 elementary teachers to identify and discuss an artifact that represented their students’ thinking in science. Rather than discuss specific disciplinary content, teachers described what students were “doing” in producing that artifact. The results of this study demonstrate attending to what students are doing is one way teachers notice students’ thinking in science, and in these descriptions of “doing” lie important connections to the scientific and engineering practices of the Next Generation Science Standards. This study can inform the design of teacher learning experiences in which artifacts and teachers’ tendency to focus on what students are doing can be leveraged toward learning to notice students’ thinking in science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the literature on science teaching suggests that elementary teachers lack relevant prior experiences with science. This study begins to reframe the deficit approach to research in science teaching by privileging the experiences elementary teachers have had with science – both in and out of schools – throughout their lives. Our work uses identity as a lens to examine the complexities of elementary teachers’ narrative accounts of their experiences with science over the course of their lives. Our findings identify components of teachers’ science-related experiences in order to lay the groundwork for making connections between teachers’ personal experiences and professional practice. This work demonstrates that teachers’ storied lives are important for educational researchers and teacher educators, as they reveal elements of teaching knowledge that may be productive and resourceful for refining teachers’ science practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Curriculum integration can increase the presence of science at the elementary level. The purpose of this article is to share how two second-grade teachers have integrated language arts content as a part of science-language arts instruction in a garden-based learning context. One application was a teacher-designedGardening for Homonymslesson, which supported new ways of thinking about words and wordplay while developing science vocabulary related to structure and function, diversity of life, and interdependent relationships in ecosystems. This article provides the lesson and discusses its implementation in two second-grade classrooms. Examples of student work illustrate children's creative thought around and application of multiple meaning words. Pre-, post-, and extended posttest measures of students' ability to generate and to use homonyms demonstrate that this science-language arts integrated lesson can result in both short- and long-term learning. Applications and follow-up from the lesson over two subsequent years have engaged second and third grade students in study/inquiry about plant growth and life cycles while utilizing many facets of language arts, which have ranged from labeling an experimental design and writing predictions and results to conversing about digital “GigaPan” images on growing strawberries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]