Department of Teaching, Learning and Teacher Education

 

Date of this Version

2008

Citation

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching: Baltimore, MD. 2008

Comments

Copyright (c) 2008 Elizabeth Lewis, Dale Baker, Senay Yasar, & Michael Lang.

Abstract

The Communication in Science Inquiry Project (CISIP) provides schoolbased teams of secondary science and English and/or ELL teachers with year-round professional development with the goal of establishing scientific classroom discourse communities (SCDC). Teams participated in one of two three-week CISIP summer institutes. Four CISIP model elements of a SCDC can be framed within a pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) taxonomy at two levels: domain-specific PCK, including academic language development, written discourse, and oral discourse; and general pedagogy, specifically scientific inquiry. The fifth professional development element focuses on overarching learning principles that are applicable to any discipline. By situating the CISIP professional development model within teacher knowledge this clarifies the purpose of the institutes and the PCK taxonomy can be employed as a research lens. With the exception of scientific inquiry, both science and English/ELL teachers broadened their pedagogical awareness, but need more time to refine their conceptual framework of the five SCDC pedagogies. Both science and English/ELL teachers would benefit from more explicit distinctions between domain-specific and general pedagogical strategies. Not surprisingly participants exhibited a greater awareness of the ALD and discourse pedagogical strategies than on the scientific inquiry PCK, which was addressed less explicitly in the professional development activities.

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