Preparing for conferences: AERA and NARST

Well, I've finished my AERA paper and my NARST paper, and now I just need to put the talks together. I thought I'd take a few minutes to write a brief blog post about preparing for these conferences and about what I'll do when I'm there.

Conference preparation is always interesting. You submit proposals eight to nine months in advance, and get around to writing the papers about 3 weeks before the conference (or at least this is how it plays out for me). By then, I find it hard to be entirely faithful to my proposal. Usually the resulting paper is much more than the proposal indicated. Crafting these written works is indeed important, because they are the vehicle by which we first share our ideas and work with colleagues outside of our immediate working group. Also, these papers are often the first formal drafts of manuscripts which will later be submitted for publication in refereed journals.

Once the paper is written, I usually put together the PowerPoint talk about a week in advance. The .ppt is perhaps a dreadful format/means by which to deliver your talk, but it is the expected norm (unless you're giving a poster). The talk itself is between eight and 15 minutes long depending on the session type and format. Usually there is time for a few questions after the talk or at the end of the session. So in all, you may have about 20 minutes "on stage" to communicate and respond directly to your audience.

To me, however, the true value of conference attendance and presentation is not necessarily in the formal delivery of the research talk. While very important and necessary for introducing people to your work, the most valuable part of this whole experience is meeting others who are interested in similar research topics and developing relationships which might lead to connection and collaboration. It is great to get to know other people in your field. to discuss ideas with each other, and to brainstorm new ideas and future work. Much like when I was a classroom teacher and used to go to NSTA every year, I felt recharged and invigorated after talking to other science teachers outside of my own school. In many ways, conference attendance can help to battle the isolation teachers and academics can feel when we're pursuing our own thing most of the year.

Of course, for myself right now at this early stage in my career as an educational researcher, these connections are also essential to make as I'll be on the job market soon. I'm not sure where this PhD will take me when I finish it within the next year, but I've got to keep all of the doors open and going to these conferences is a great way to "collect" those doors. So if you're going to be at AERA or NARST in the next couple of weeks, look me up. My AERA talk is Tuesday the 14th at 8:15 in the San Diego Marriott, San Diego Ballroom Salon B. It is entitled Can Science Teachers' Strategic Knowledge be Conceptualized as a Learning Progression? and is part of the symposium "Learning Progressions for Teacher Development. At NARST, my talk is Sunday the 19th at 4:00 and is a part of the symposium "A Longitudinal Study on Pedagogical Content Knowledge: Synthesizing our Research on Content, Pedagogy, and Practice." It is in Salon III of the Hyatt. 

What defines "expertise" in science teaching?

This is a question that I've been interested in for years, and is central to my current dissertation work (more on that later). Since I've built up a great PLN on twitter which includes many science teachers and science enthusiasts, I decided to pose the question to my tweeps. Here is a sample of their responses:

@gregorylouie said: @Bud_T Expertise ? Subject-Matter expertise + specific understanding of learning progressions based on research using developmental psych

@martywittrock said: @Bud_T A teacher that REALLY knows the subject matter but can explain it in common sense terms that a student can apply immediately

@mwacker said: @Bud_T Expert= experience, fresh ideas, and understanding of processes...what's your answer?

@wgraziadei said: @Bud_T expertise in sci: curious, visual, tactile, analytical, interactive, collaborative, reflective, professional practitioner/learner

@elizabethonline said: @Bud_T thorough interdisciplinary knowledge, know "why we care", excitement about the exciting stuff, and skills for remembering the tedium

Interesting ideas from folks: subject matter knowledge, understanding of student thinking, curiosity, experience, interactive nature, collaborative, reflective, communication skills, etc. I certainly can't disagree with any of these things, and I'm sure the list could go on and on.

But let me refine the question a bit for the purposes of the rest of this post: what knowledge do expert science teachers hold? I purposefully parse this from dispositions in order to try and bring the conversation into teacher education and to figure out what we, as science teacher educators, can teach in order to help prepare good beginning science teachers.

Certainly, knowledge of scientific subject matter is important. I don't think anyone would disagree with this. Two other things, which are at least hinted at in the above thoughts and are central to my dissertation work, are knowledge of specific student learning difficulties in the area being taught, and knowledge of appropriate representations of subject matter. When conceptualized within contextual knowledge, these two things along with subject matter knowledge form the essential components of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK; Shulman, 1986). For a more detailed explanation of my interpretation of this model of science teacher knowledge, please see my research proposal (Talbot, 2008).

Now I'm not saying that these are unequivocally the most important knowledge domains for a science teacher to possess, though I do believe they are very important. Further, they are things we can teach prospective science teachers in our teacher education courses. Many of us already focus on these things through the teaching and inclusion of inquiry, assessment, knowing students, etc. But, can we fully articulate why these things are important? That's something I'm working on- the 30 second "elevator speech" as one of my advisers would call it. Can you (or I) convince someone of what a highly qualified science teacher must know? I think we (science teacher educators) should all be able to do this, and further I believe we should use our voices to inform and even influence policy. 

Please let me know what you think. As always, comments are welcomed.

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New twitter responses since this was posted:

@BeckyFisher 73 said: @Bud_T I think understanding misconceptions and being able to unteach them is huge for a science teacher.

@chrisludwig said: @Bud_T A highly qualified science teacher must know how to tell good science from bad and be able to teach students to tell the difference

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References

Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching.Educational Researcher, 15(2), 4-14.

Talbot, R. M. (2008). Measuring science teacher knowledge: Domain-general or domain-specific? (Research proposal). Boulder, CO: University of Colorado at Boulder.

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Dissertation data collection: A critical time in the next few weeks

My dissertation data collection begins in earnest this week, with the pre-administration of two surveys of science teacher knowledge: the Flexible Application of Student-Centered Instruction (FASCI) and the physics-FASCI. For more information on each of these surveys, visit the FASCI webpage at http://tinyurl.com/645b8d. The FASCI survey is content-neutral, in that the classroom scenarios presented and the questions asked are not placed in the context of any particular science content, only a "high school science class." The physics-FASCI places the same scenarios into the context of specific physics content, such as statements like "you are teaching Newton's 3rd Law..." My goal in administering these two versions of the FASCI is to investigate the domain-specificity of this particular aspect of science teacher knowledge. 

Participants from four universities around the country will be randomly assigned to take one version or the other, both pre- and post-semesters' instruction. The first of these administrations begins this week, and hopefully all pre-administrations will be complete within the next three weeks. I will then conduct think-aloud interviews and observe the teaching practice of a subset of respondents in order to contribute to a validity argument for each version of the instrument. The full research proposal can be seen at the website mentioned above.