Eliciting and working with student thinking: Preservice science teachers' enactment of core practices when orchestrating collaborative group work

Abstract

<p>As more and more science teacher educators are subscribing to a practice-based teacher education curriculum, it is becoming increasingly necessary to identify and articulate smaller grain-sized teaching practices nested within a core practice in important instructional contexts in order to facilitate preservice science teachers' (PSTs') learning of core practices. This paper illustrates how to achieve this goal using data from a qualitative study that aimed to characterize how PSTs enact the core practice of eliciting and working with student thinking in the three key stages of collaborative group work in rehearsals: whole-class warm-up, small group work, and whole-class share-out. Based on existing teaching practices synthesized from prior studies, as well as empirical data from the study, we identify the intermediate-level practices (teaching moves) and technique-level practices (talk moves) enacted by PSTs when orchestrating group work as well as the PSTs' strengths and missed opportunities in enacting these different grain-sized practices. Findings reveal that, although the PSTs were able to enact a variety of talk moves when orchestrating group work, they missed opportunities to engage in intermediate-level practices. For example, there were only a few instances in which the PSTs could explicitly work with the student thinking they noticed while circulating among the groups during whole-class share-out. We also identify three ways in which the PSTs used this intermediate-level practice, reflective of their differing orientations toward using student thinking. We propose an integrative framework that decomposes the focal core practice into a nested set of practices of varying grain sizes, including medium grain-sized teaching moves and small grain-sized talk moves, during and across the key stages of group work. We discuss the implications of our findings for science teacher preparation and methodological approaches for capturing PSTs' enactment of the focal core practice, as well as the possible contributions of the framework.<br></p>