Engaging High School Science Teachers in Personalized Professional Learning

Book excerpt: The current educational climate, featuring standards-based reforms and reliance on summative assessment and managerial control has strained the professional work of teachers by simultaneously demanding compliance with reform effort and control of classrooms while expecting in-depth professional learning to shift their pedagogical strategies to provide deeper cognitive experiences for students. Currently, the managerial and high-stakes accountability forces on teachers are prevailing, leaving teachers in a state of low motivation with limited time and resources to further their pedagogical content knowledge. In addition, the educational system lacks the resources and technical ability to provide high quality professional learning experiences for teachers. This design development study attempts to motivate high school science teachers into a state of learning through classroom experimentation and reflection on student learning. This research involved seven science teachers at high-poverty, urban high school with a large portion of English learners and student of color. During a series of seven 90-minute workshops, the participating teachers created personalized professional learning plans based on their self-identified teaching characteristics and goals for their own learning. Subsequently, they attempted pedagogical strategies and presented artifacts of students learning to their colleagues. Being highly contextualized research, design development studies provide the great insight into the specific context where implemented but also illuminate deep challenges facing our educational system, such as motivating teachers to learn advanced pedagogical strategies in response to student learning. Results from participant responses to structured and semi-structured pre/post interview questions combined with analysis of process data collected during the implementation of the workshop series yielded salient trends in the participating teachers’ learning. While most participants attempted new strategies and began tracking learning by reviewing student artifacts, the pedagogical strategies attempted focused on general engagement strategies rather than deeper science pedagogical strategies. This suggested a willingness to try new strategies and a possible need for explicit examples of high-quality science teaching strategies during professional development experiences. Additionally, the teachers deepened their reflective conversation throughout the project and began to focus more on their learning and control of classroom experiences over the perceived deficits of the student population. However, the language used to describe teaching and learning did not advance to the desired technical level, suggesting a need for additional time repeating learning cycles with a learning experience to bolster technical analysis of learning. This design development study reinforces much of the theorized suggestions for high quality professional learning in science education. Questions remain regarding sustainability and the effects of prolonged and engaging teacher learning opportunities.