Teacher collaboration for science activity design.

Abstract

An effective way of preparing teachers for professional development is the establishment of learning networks and collaboration among teachers. This study presents the results of a yearlong science teacher collaboration project that aimed to create effective teaching strategies for high school science laboratory investigations. Five teachers from a public high school in the Southeastern U.S. and two teacher educators from a public university worked in collaboration. Our results indicated that collaboration provides cognitive and affective support for teachers who face similar challenges.

Professional development of teachers is vital to better accommodate current science education reforms. Reform movements not only require appropriate curriculum change but also change in teachers' beliefs of subject matter and teaching practices. As stated in the National Science Education Standards, an effective way of preparing teachers for professional development is the establishment of learning networks among teachers and collaboration (National Research Council, 1996).

Collaboration among teachers and effects of collaboration on teacher learning and change has been an emerging research area (Chan & Pang, 2006; Richardson & Placier, 2001). It is asserted that teacher learning is not a solitary activity, but it is a collective activity that is situated in the work place (Chan & Pang, 2006). Professional learning is more likely to be effective and meaningful if it takes place through interaction and collaboration among community members. Hargreaves and Giles (2003) highlighted three important components of a professional learning community: collaborative work and discussion, strong focus on teaching and learning, and gathering data to make assessments and improve teaching practices. In similar lines, Little (2002) further summarizes the value of teacher collaboration as follows: "Conditions for improving teaching and learning are strengthened when teachers collectively question ineffective teaching routines, examine new conceptions of teaching and learning, find generative means to acknowledge and respond to difference and conflict, and engage in supporting professional growth (p.917)." Little's assertions reflect an idea of teaching that is sensitive to contemporary issues of our time. For example, teachers today cannot be unresponsive to demands for increased teaching performance, adopting new teaching strategies, understanding cultural diversity, and continuous professional development.

Related literature in this field showed that teacher collaboration is beneficial for several reasons. Having an informal, flexible, unprescriptive, innovative and borderless nature, teacher learning networks are efficient alternatives to bureaucratically organized programs of professional developments (Lieberman, 2000). Since the learning networks are organized by the common interest and volunteer efforts of the participants, the pressure and stress of arbitrary bureaucratic decisions on teachers are eliminated. Collegiality also helps teachers to break the isolation of the classroom. By working together for instructional planning and decisions teachers have a chance to explore their colleagues' ideas and make decisions toward improving their classroom practice (Little, 1990). As recent research shows, acting in collaboration provides teachers moral support and confidence (Johnson, 2003). With an increased moral well-being teachers are more likely to take action towards new classroom innovations to improve the quality of instruction. Another benefit of teacher collaboration is that teachers will have opportunities to assess their career choices. Working with different success and experience levels of teachers, colleagues will see their personal positions better, make decisions for future career choices, and even discover new possibilities for their careers. For example, as we learn from the teachers in our community, nowadays many teachers seem to be inspired by their successful colleagues to pursue a National Board for Professional Teaching Standards certification.

Little (1990) referred to the basic activity in teachers' collegiality as, talk about teaching. This talk includes: sharing, planning and preparation, classroom observation, training together, and training one another. Talking to each other often, teacher can gain theoretically rich and practically meaningful ideas through exchanges. Teacher can also plan and prepare together for their lessons. Working together on planning not only reduces the time spent on planning, but it will also provide teachers with more choices of material and ideas (Little, 1990). Another activity that can be part of teacher collegiality is that teachers observe each other's classroom teaching, provide peer critique and peer coaching. Through peer coaching activities teachers can examine their practice and see their weak and strong sides of teaching. Teacher collaboration is also a step toward action research (Burbank & Kauchak, 2003). In action research, teachers systematically approach their practice to understand the complex nature of teaching. When teachers understand their teaching and support learning more clearly, there is a high possibility that the experience of the students will improve (Feldman, 1996). Feldman's research in which he examined the physical science teachers' collaborative action research showed that three mechanisms are used by teachers to generate and share knowledge: anecdote telling, trying out of ideas, and systematic inquiry. These mechanisms pave the road to change in teachers practice.

It has been long known that teachers' beliefs and practices are resistant to change (Richardson & Placier, 2001). Teacher collaboration can provide support for teachers' professional development, and the change process (Briscoe & Peters, 1997). In this respect, teacher learning networks provide effective ways of communication among peers, which has a potential to reduce resistance to change and innovation (van Driel, Beijaard, & Verloop, 2001). It has been asserted that learning from peers, which is the horizontal learning, could be more effective than learning from and external expert, which is the vertical learning (Galesloot, Koetsier, & Wubbels, 1997 as cited in van Driel et al, 2001). Moreover, it is known that most professional development activities are one-sided, which could be in either a top-down or a bottom-up form. In top-down processes, ideas of professional development are originated from the outside of the schools, and in bottom up processes individual teachers direct their own development (Palinscar, Magnusson, Marano, Ford, & Brown, 1998). Therefore, teacher collaborations that bring forward the idea of interdependence as opposed to the one-sided professional development efforts offer alternative and effective ways of professional development. Establishment of discourse communities are important for teachers to pick up new roles and changing ideas. Professional communities wherein new teaching materials and strategies are discussed are being suggested as effective ways of changing teachers' vision (McLaughlin & Talbert, 1993).

There are studies suggesting that school site learning experiences and practices are important ways to improve staff development (Chan & Pang, 2006; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001). Research in cognition supports these thoughts. Situated cognition theories assume that physical and social contexts of learning environments are integral part of the learning process (Putnam & Borko, 2000). Therefore, teachers' learning is situated into their classroom practice and peer discussions. Beside its situated nature, cognition has also social peculiarity in our teacher development context because the interaction among the teachers at the school is the major determinant of what is learned and how learning takes place. From this vantage point, when teachers come together and discuss about different teaching strategies and instruction tools they actually enculturate each other with the customs and ways of thinking of teaching profession.

Design of Our Professional Development Project

Our professional development project took place in a public high school in the Southeastern United States. Using an overall social constructivist and situated cognition framework, we endeavored to develop a collaborative team of science educators interested in improving laboratory investigations. We elicited participation from volunteer teachers. Five of the eleven teachers at the high school volunteered to participate. They included a female veteran chemistry teacher, a female anatomy and physiology teacher, a female veteran biology and physical science teacher, a female biology teacher with five years of experience, and a male chemistry and physical science teacher with two years of experience. Volunteer teachers from the science department of the high school and two teacher educators, one professor and one graduate student, from the University of Georgia met on a regular basis during the academic year of 2001-2002. We named our professional development groups as "science special interest group." In the special interest group meetings, teachers brought and exchanged their ideas to design inquiry-based laboratory activities. The researchers facilitated the discussions and communications among the group members, and provided some resource materials. Science teachers, on the other hand, designed the science laboratory investigation activities. Teachers in the special interest group were engaged in different activities, such as readings, colleague discussions, science unit design, and assessment.

One of the guiding references used in the design of the activities was the Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) intervention. Teachers were provided with the reference article "Inquiry Investigations" (Hand & Keys, 1999) by the researchers. In the article, the SWH is explained as an alternative form of laboratory reports. The SWH includes two basic components, a teacher template and a student template. The teacher template is intended to guide teacher-designed activities that promote laboratory understandings. For example, teachers first explore students' pre-instruction understandings, and facilitate a series of negotiation phases in which students write about personal meanings for laboratory results, compare and contrast their ideas with peers, write reflections, and so forth. The student template of the SWH is intended to stimulate student thinking. For example, it asks students to write their research question, observations, claims, and evidence. Reading this article about the SWH, teacher gained a model idea of an inquiry-based laboratory activity, which emphasizes writing. Teachers modified the SWH according to their needs.

The major activities of the special interest group included the trial and reflection on the use of the SWH in the chemistry course, sharing and reflection on an open-ended inquiry using wasps in the biology course, brainstorming ideas for using writing in the anatomy and physiology course, and the design of two week long units for the physical science courses, one on electricity and one on magnetism. Using a combination of resources, the teachers collaboratively designed activities and units. These units were then taught and assessed. Discussion of both qualitative observations of teaching effectiveness and the quantitative data of student assessment took place at the meetings. Two teachers were able to teach both the electricity and magnetism units in full. Teachers also had an opportunity to make their own assessment. They administrated pre- and post-tests for the unit, in order to evaluate their design. They also assessed students' writings in the SWH activities including laboratory sheets and final written paragraphs. The chemistry teacher assessed group discussion using the SWH with an observation technique. The teachers found that students participating in the electricity and magnetisms units did increase their pre- to post-test knowledge significantly.

Assessment of the Professional Development Project

In this section, we will report our findings from the interviews that we conducted with teachers and from the open-ended teacher questionnaire responses. Total five teachers participated in this project. Two of the participating teachers were interviewed. Remaining three teachers and one of the teachers interviewed filled out the questionnaire forms. All of the five teachers agreed that unit design was the most useful activity for them because they developed material which they can actually apply into their classroom practice. Collaborative group activities have been beneficial for teachers in different ways. At the end of the project, teachers felt more confident engaging in teaching inquiry-based lessons. For example one of the teachers, Anita said:

   I like using the SWH in designing inquiry activities. It provides
   a framework that makes adopting regular laboratory to inquiry
   activities easy. Before learning about this, my use of inquiry
   was sporadic and haphazard.

One of the teachers, Lucy who indicated in the interview that she was hesitant to try new classroom innovations, said the following about the "special interest group" project:

   I liked it better than I thought I would. It is very interesting
   because students get hooked and not quit quickly. Some student
   that quit easily on written problems worked very hard to make
   motors that would work.

Another teacher, Cristina, provided the following comments about the project: "I have tried to incorporate meaningful science investigations in several occasions, I should do it more often. Participating in this group was a way to force myself to reflect more on my teaching and get feedback from my colleagues." Teachers also learned about student writing. Both teachers interviewed had frustration with their application of student writings as an assessment tool. Clarke said, "I learned that they can't write well. I knew that but ... when you are reading your own kids' stuff ... somebody else is reading your students' stuff is another story, you realize it more how bad it is." In another excerpt Clarke continued:

   In general though they do better on those kinds of tests [writing
   tests] than on multiplechoice tests. The writing is still horrible,
   what you can grade is dramatically bad but you can ... If you
   can decide what they are trying to say I think they are expressive
   then.

Although both teachers were frustrated with the poor quality of students' writing, they felt that the writing assignments allowed students to express what they learned about science. Clarke seemed to have a little frustration with some of the activities he did in the electricity and magnetism units. He believed that activities alone are not going to change the thinking that associated with inquiry-based learning. Clarke was especially concerned with students' bad communication skills: "I think they can learn, but they cannot communicate what they learn." Clarke thought that the SWH really helped him to have his students in written form.

The electricity unit activities were in some sense unusual for Lucy, who stated: "Because I don't usually do things that way, where you have them trying to put something together without having explain to them. I usually explain everything to them and say 'now do this'." Lucy was concerned about giving students more freedom brings extra problems with classroom management. "I usually explain everything to them and say 'now do this', and when somebody say 'I don't know what this means, well it is your notes right there. "I don't know what to do next, well here is the directions and here is the notes that explain it."

Lucy was ambivalent about the success of the new units. In one portion of the interview she stated: "the best way to teach something is the way you learned it." She argued that she will probably continue to use a structured learning style: "Because you know it works, because you learned that way ... it is kind of foolish to do something else but at the same time you can recognize that other people do it in different way, then I do try to improve different things like that". Her willingness to try things new ways led to her participation in the "special interest group." While not entirely comfortable with inquiry-based teaching, she did note positive aspects. For example, she felt like every student was somehow involved in the process of experiment. To her surprise, a girl student who usually has low grades was very successful in doing her activity, and she was successful without even asking for help. Therefore, Lucy thought that inquiry-based activities helped reach out the students who usually seem to be lower achievers. Clarke believed that to design more effective activities requires more thinking. Especially during the planning process of electricity unit, Clarke spent more time and effort than he usually spends and he believed this made the activity more useful to the student.

Conclusions

Collaboration of participant teachers in our project involved three distinct phases: discussing and brainstorming about effective laboratory activity ideas that can promote inquiry learning, designing and implementing these activities, and making a self-assessment of teaching these activities. These teacher activities were similar to what was identified in the literature as a collaborative work (Hargreaves & Giles, 2003; Little, 2002). Our research suggests that teacher collaborations are useful for several reasons. First, as revealed in the literature (Johnson 2003), collaboration provides cognitive and affective support for teachers who undergo the same process. As teachers communicate to each other, they share their similar or dissimilar experiences so that they can better understand and assess their situation as to classroom instruction. Teachers in our study benefited from more resources, diverse thinking in the group, and increased reflection on science teaching. Second, collaboration provided opportunities for more eclectic approaches for classroom instruction. As we learned from participating teachers, they have different choices and styles in their instruction, and they are often reluctant to use different strategies because of risk of failure. However, when they learn the experiences of their colleagues, they feel more confident in their choice toward classroom practice and innovations. Moreover, when teachers try a new idea together, they share the burden of making mistake. The implementation of new strategies also helped teachers to see their students from a different perspective. For example, students who were usually viewed as average or low achievers by a teacher can have a chance to change this impression when new alternative classroom innovations are implemented. Teachers also learned about their students' learning. For example, teachers realized that their students writing skills are not adequate.

In summary, as shown in the literature review, previous research in this field almost unequivocally agreed upon the value of teacher collaboration. Our results were congruent with the literature in that participant teachers benefited from collaborative environment. However, collaborative efforts can be even more efficient if they are perceived and planned as a part of long-term professional goals within learning networks and supported by institutions (Burbank & Kauchak, 2003; van Driel, 2001). Professional development initiatives should encourage collaborative efforts among teachers that are sustainable and span long terms.

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Deniz Peker, Middle East Technical University, Turkey

Carolyn S. Wallace, The University of Georgia

Deniz Peker, Ph.D., is an Instructor/Researcher of Science Education in the Faculty of Education Carolyn S. Wallace, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Science Education in the School of Education