Learning to Teach for Epistemic Agency: Sustaining Reform-Based Pedagogies in the Context of the Next Generation Science Standards
Supported by University of Illinois Campus Research Board Grant #RB18139 ($27,000)
June 2018 - current
The objective of this project is to examine teacher learning around supporting students' epistemic agency: having students take ownership over the intellectual work of doing science and make decisions about how that work should proceed. This question will be addressed by conducting retrospective interviews with teachers who are involved in developing and implementing NGSS-aligned curricular units about their ongoing curriculum development work; and by having teachers collect and reflect on point-of-view (POV) observations, an innovative methodology for investigating teachers' in-the-moment cognition, during the implementation of their designed units in the 2018-2019 school year.
We are currently analyzing video from three teachers' classrooms. In addition, we led a professional development workshop in July 2019 focused on supporting students' epistemic agency. We will be following up with the teachers who attended to further study how they are making adaptations to their units to support student agency, both while planning and while teaching.
Some initial findings from this study so far include:
Conference papers presenting these findings are currently under review for AERA 2020 and NARST 2020. Stay tuned!
The objective of this project is to examine teacher learning around supporting students' epistemic agency: having students take ownership over the intellectual work of doing science and make decisions about how that work should proceed. This question will be addressed by conducting retrospective interviews with teachers who are involved in developing and implementing NGSS-aligned curricular units about their ongoing curriculum development work; and by having teachers collect and reflect on point-of-view (POV) observations, an innovative methodology for investigating teachers' in-the-moment cognition, during the implementation of their designed units in the 2018-2019 school year.
We are currently analyzing video from three teachers' classrooms. In addition, we led a professional development workshop in July 2019 focused on supporting students' epistemic agency. We will be following up with the teachers who attended to further study how they are making adaptations to their units to support student agency, both while planning and while teaching.
Some initial findings from this study so far include:
- Teachers have varied and wide-ranging personal definitions for what "students' epistemic agency" means and looks like in their classrooms -- and relatedly, they have varied and wide-ranging strategies for supporting it. Rather than seeing this as a deficit (i.e., some teachers have the "right" understanding while others don't), we see this as reflective of the complexity involved in supporting students' epistemic agency.
- When working to "open up space" for students' epistemic agency in curriculum materials, planning for epistemic agency was different than planning for coherence from students' perspectives in that it encouraged teachers to attend to areas in which they should anticipate (and encourage) productive deviations from the planned materials. The nature of these deviations varied amongst teachers, but for all this was a new "lens" for interpreting materials and planning for instruction.
Conference papers presenting these findings are currently under review for AERA 2020 and NARST 2020. Stay tuned!