Developing Professional Vision for Practice: Preservice Teachers using Students' Scientific Ideas in Simulations of Practice.

Abstract

Learning to teach science is difficult for preservice elementary teachers. It involves adopting the practices and principles valued in the teaching profession. A central challenge novice teachers face is learning to interpret students’ ideas as they construct explanations of phenomena. The particular ways that teachers see and understand instructional interactions has been referred to as professional vision (Goodwin, 1994). This dissertation examined the ways in which a simulation of practice called “Peer Teaching” supported the development of novices’ professional vision in the context of an elementary science methods course. Each novice teacher role-played a “teacher” and taught three science lessons to a team of novices and a teacher educator who acted as “elementary students. ” The central research question in this study was: How do preservice teachers develop professional vision for practice in the context of Peer Teaching feedback discussions? Qualitative data were collected from 16 novice teachers in four Peer Teaching teams. These data included 48 videos of Peer Teaching feedback discussions, Peer Teaching artifacts, and interviews with one novice teacher from each team. The findings of the study suggest that developing professional vision in simulations involves learning to notice and use what is valued in the profession, the professional Discourse. Specifically, my analyses indicated that opportunities for developing professional vision occurred as the novices and the teacher educators (1) established a professional Discourse through tools; (2) approximated the professional Discourse through roles; (3) identified challenges of the professional Discourse; (4) used the professional Discourse to articulate thinking about the challenges; and (5) used the professional Discourse to envision alternatives to the challenges. Novices’ noticing was supported and constrained by the features of the Peer Teaching as located in the interacting contexts of the course and the teacher education program. This was evident in the ways novices expressed a contradiction between two competing objects of developing professional vision: identifying problems of practice and affirming peers’ practice. The concepts of professional Discourse and interacting contexts have implications for the design of teaching simulations to support novices’ development of professional vision.