Exploring the tensions science teachers navigate as they enact their visions for science teaching: what their feedback can tell us

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on inservice science teachers’ collaborative feedback to each other on videos of their classroom teaching during debrief sessions. We aimed to understand how the teachers’ feedback reflected their vision for science education and how they collaboratively identified and discussed the misalignments between their vision and actual classroom practices. Ten videos of debrief sessions involving 17 K-12 science teachers participating in a teacher leadership professional development program were analysed. The feedback captured the teachers’ reflections as they collaboratively identified issues that were important to them and attempted to resolve them together. Our initial analysis of the data led us to frame our study within the literature on critical reflection, democratic practices, and student agency in science education. The teachers had a deep awareness of the need for democratic practices and shared power in their classrooms. Their feedback, however, revealed the tensions that arose as they discussed enactments of each of these tenets in the classroom. This study contributes to the literature on feedback given among inservice science teachers and proposes a professional development model that supports teachers’ professional learning in a social and democratic setting.

KEYWORDS:

• Professional development
• teacher feedback
• democratic practices

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Wipro Limited and the University of Massachusetts Boston for supporting the program. They are thankful also for the enthusiastic and inspirational teacher leader participants of the project, also known as the Wipro SEF Fellows.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Wipro Science Education Fellowship sub-award contract from the University of Massachusetts Boston.