Teacher Development: A Model From Science Education

Abstract

This book reports on the findings of a three-year research project carried out in New Zealand. It documents the teacher development process for a group of science teachers that took part in the `Learning in Science project'. A main focus of this project was to make teachers use new teaching activities to take into account students' thinking, constructivist views of learning and alternative conceptions. The model of teacher development described in the book consists of an interrelated process of social, personal and professional development. It is based on a (mainly) social constructivist view of learning as teacher development. This choice is extensively discussed. Two research findings that informed the model as well as the view of learning are presented as `feeling better about myself as a teacher' and as `better learning'. Both are factors that helped teacher development to take place, the first meaning that teachers reported that they were `more like the teachers they would like to be' and that `they felt better about themselves as teachers' as a result of changing their teaching activities. The second factor means that, in their opinion, `better learning' occurred during their lessons. Feedback, support and reflection are reported as important mechanisms to let development occur. One aspect of the personal development that is part of teacher development is the managing of feelings associated with changing classroom activities and beliefs about science education. Data from the research project related to this aspect are reported. A particular activity that turned out to be effective for teacher development was the use of anecdotes. Finally, teacher development is discussed within a broader contemporary theoretical context. This book reports, without doubt, about an interesting and important project: how to change science classrooms so that better learning may take place. If this problem has a solution, science teachers are certainly at the heart of it, as well as the question of how to enable them to do so. So, the question of science teacher development certainly needs careful consideration and this book reports many relevant insights. Having said this, I also felt some disappointment after having read it. The book describes a rather general model of teacher development, related to rather general theoretical considerations about constructivist views of learning and, in my opinion, to a typically British piece of intellectual policy-context discussion that does not really fit in with the project description. This may make the book interesting reading for researchers in education, but the science educator and science teacher trainer, let alone the science teacher, would have been better served, I think, by a more detailed description of what has been done in the project itself: which science teaching activities and science teacher development activities lead to which better science learning and to which science teacher development and why. By not reporting the practice on which the theory is built, at least not in this book, the putting into practice of that theory by others becomes an unnecessarily difficult task. The more so as it is not at all self-evident what practices may be implied by too frequently used terms like `(re)constructing' and `constructivism'.