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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Mining the tweetstream

Last night's inaugural educhat conversation on twitter prompted me to again think about how we might mine the tweetstream for information on teaching and learning. I collected all tweets tagged #educhat (thanks to the help of others, such as @aforgrave), and also did this recently for the tweets tagged #colearning from Colorado Learning 2.0. This morning while driving from place to place, I recorded some of my thoughts (via gcast) on mining and coding this data. I'd be very interested on your input and ideas- please listen and comment, email me, or contact me on twitter (@Bud_T). 

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Educhat discussions on twitter

Rodd Lucier (@thecleversheep) brought up the idea of having an #educhat discussion on twitter, similar to the #journchat discussions among journalists, bloggers, and PR types. Note that in each case, the hash symbol (#) in front of the name facilitates later searching of tweets. See my eariler post on hashtags for more on this. There is great power in using the hashtag and identifying trending discussions. For example, at last weekend's Learning 2.0- A Colorado Conversation conference (or "unconference"), those of us live-tweeting (perhaps 10-20 people?) drove the hashtag #colearning to the 5th highest trending topic on twitter at one point. (*A discussion of these tweets is the subject of a forthcoming blog post). 

#educhat discussions would focus on a particular topic in education which would be determined by the needs and interests of the twitter education/#educhat community. Rodd and I have described #educhats a bit in the Twitter for Teachers e-book. On this page, there is a simple Google form designed to allow folks to suggest topics, times, days, and frequencies for #educhats. Please take a moment to go to that page and enter some suggestions if you are so inclined. There are certainly a lot of topics we could chat about, and this would also be a great way to find like-minded tweeple to follow and build your PLN. 

We were thinking of having the first #educhat on Monday March 9th. The time has not been nailed down yet, but we were thinking about sometime after 8:30 EST. Of course that time is only a suggestion for starting, as I'm sure the discussion will continue and migrate westward as the Earth rotates. Please suggest a topic, join in, and track the discussion using the hashtag #educhat. 

The Twitter for Teachers e-book

Recently I came across the Twitter for Teachers e-book collaborative effort, based in a wetpaint wiki. This project was started by Rodd Lucier (@thecleversheep) and has grown to include over 100 members in its first ten days of existence. The project is aimed at developing a Twitter reference for teachers at all levels would would like to get to know Twitter, what it can offer, and how to use it in the classroom. I was very excited to hear about this project, as I've been wishing we had a sort of clearinghouse for information on uses of twitter in education. I think this site has the potential to be a leading dynamic reference on the topic, and more importantly a collaborative hub for those interested in using twitter in educational settings. 

Perhaps the coolest thing about this site (besides the important topic) is the collaborative atmosphere and nature. Within the first day of having joined, I felt welcomed to contribute to the structure of the e-book and to contribute to dialog about the project. Rodd is very active on Twitter and responsive to activity on the Twitter for Teachers site.

The best place to start exploring the site is the developing table of contents. In this space you can see the true collaborative nature of the project. Members suggest and make changes to the structure of the site, and head off to various pages linked from the table of contents to develop the actual content. Rodd has also provided some good information on how to contribute to the project, including videos on indexing yourself as a "twitterteacher" on delicious, and adding yourself to the project's Google map.

I encourage you the check out the site if you are a teacher interested in using twitter, whether you want to contribute or not. There is a quickly-growing wealth of information in this e-book.

How can web2.0 technologies facilitate classroom-based group work?

In a recent posting, I discussed how I thought the shift in use of technology in the science classroom would place the emphasis on collaboration, rather than on instrumentation (but without losing the many great data collection and analysis uses of technology we now employ). I've been thinking more about how collaborative and communicative uses of technology can enhance group work in the science classroom.

There are many types of collaborative grouping employed in science classrooms: group problem solving, group lab activities, pair-share, peer tutoring, jigsaw, and student teams/games to name a few. I'm sure there are many others. What are some ways in which web2.0 communications technologies can contribute to science classroom-based group learning? I'm thinking of technologies and specific applications such as chat, video chat, blogging, microblogging (e.g. twitter , cirip.ro, edmodo), online collaborative document/spreadsheet/presentation construction (e.g. Google Docs), and many others.

What follows is a brainstormed list- I certainly hope others will add to it though comments, etc.

• Extension of group working time: I think the most obvious enhancement has to do with "extending" the time that groups are able to physically spend working together. Continued collaboration via email or chat is not uncommon, but what other possibilities are opened up by things such as Google video chat, nearly synchronous document authoring in Google Docs, desktop sharing applications (e.g. Microsoft Shared View), etc? I'm thinking of this category of use in a synchronous way, with all (or many) group members collaborating and communicating at the same time.
• Online workspace: Related to the above but conceptualized in more of an asynchronous way is the idea of an online workspace for student groups. Within a classroom Ning or webpage, students could have their own group space in order to share ideas, documents, solutions, etc. Think of this as an online lab table or whiteboard.
  
• Working group updates, or "a-ha!" sharing: One really great potential application involves the anytime updating of the group with new ideas or breakthroughs. Because mobile devices make sharing so easy via text message or microblog post, members can notify others when they have an "a-ha!" moment or just an idea which pertains to the group work. More importantly, a record of that idea then exists in the cloud, ready to be harvested and fully documented/explicated later on (see Documentation below)..
• Sharing of group work to an outside audience: Many teachers are already using blogs as a medium for their students to share their work with a larger audience. This is a very powerful idea, and increases greatly the authenticity of the group product. But that sharing shouldn't end with the posting. The blog post/web page/document/presentation (i.e. whatever artifact gets published) should be advertised to a target audience and serve as a context for developing communication and collaboration with that audience. For example, a student group could post their solution to a complex problem and solicit a network of individuals (perhaps starting with the teacher's personal learning network, or PLN) to give feedback on their work. This would hopefully lead to network building by the students themselves. 
• Documentation: Perhaps one of the most tangible and useful aspects of using web2.0 technologies for communication and collaboration is the ability with which interactions can be documented. Online chats, tweets, posts, web pages, collaborative documents, etc all exist somewhere in the cloud. This data can later be mined and compiled if the need arises. Of course this also presents a bit of a challenge as different formats and searching methods make this a complex task. However, herein lies an opportunity to develop more 21st century skills.

I'm sure there are many more ideas and applications for using these technologies to enhance science classroom group work. Please let me know your ideas so we can develop this thread together. Post a comment or tweet me (@Bud_T) and I'l add it here, citing you of course.

AERA and NARST conference tweetup wikis

Paul Baker (@pabaker55) had the idea to create a tweetup wiki for the AERA Annual Meeting in San Diego. I think this is a great idea, and hope that association members will get involved in scheduling some tweetups. Also, I hope that everyone will use the #AERA hashtag in their related tweets so that we can all keep track of what's going on at the meeting.

I also created a tweetup wiki for the NARST annual conference in Garden Grove, CA which follows directly after AERA. Again, I encourage all to use the #NARST hashtag. 

Announcements regarding each conference tweetup wiki were posted to various listservs- please spread the word through your own channels as well. 

More uses of twitter in the classroom

Check out this collaborative Google presentation on interesting ways to use twitter in the classroom. There are some great ideas here, and the presentation is ever-growing.

Is there any single repository on the web that could best act as a clearing house for information related to uses of twitter in education? I've been building a list in diigo but it is far from complete. Please add to it if you can.