Promoting inquiry skills in Curriculum for Excellence in Science: conceptualising inquiry to improve practice

This paper describes a Scottish initiative (arising out of a EU funded development project) involving university researchers, a local authority curriculum development officer and a group of teachers interested in developing more inquiry based approaches in science education. The project is not one in which the researchers bring prescriptions from research. Rather, it is seen as a joint effort aimed at solving practitioners' conceptual and practice issues. The overall question for the teachers was, How do I (we) make our practice more inquiry based? The question for the researchers was, How do we help you (the interested science teachers) to make your practice more inquiry based? This has two sub-questions: How do we help you to conceptualise the issues? How do we help you to solve the practice problems? As it turned out, the particular group of teachers we worked with did not ask for help with practice issues, so we have not made much progress in answering the second question. Therefore, this paper will focus on the first. We seem to have been successful in helping the teachers to acquire some useful conceptual tools for thinking about and changing their practice in ways that they valued for themselves. Perhaps the answer to the second question is that researchers can help teachers to solve their practice problems by helping them to conceptualise the issues

Promoting Inquiry in Science Classrooms in European Schools : a Handbook for Tutors

In Scotland, PISCES stands for Promoting Inquiry Skills for a Curriculum for Excellence in Science. It is a CPD module for teachers of science, which has been developed in Scotland with the support of the S-TEAM project. However, this Handbook uses our international acronym in which PISCES stands for Promoting Inquiry in Science Classrooms in European Schools . It is, we believe, potentially equally as successful across Europe as it was designed around the idea of empowering teachers to think for themselves how to make their practice more-inquiry based, wherever they are. It is recognised that some school, social, policy and cultural environments may be more supportive of the idea of ‘more inquiry-based practice’ than others. PISCES empowers teachers to make small or large changes to their practice, according to those sorts of contextual factors, their own aims and how they perceive the needs of their pupils. You will note that we have been careful to use the word ‘more’ in ‘more inquiry-based.’ As befits the idea of empowerment to adapt to one’s own context, there is no single model of inquiry being ‘pushed’ here. Indeed, we count it as a measure of success of PISCES that the teachers who have participated did very different things in making their practice more inquiry-based. Strathclyde University is a leading partner in S-TEAM. Members of Strathclyde University, along with the Development Officer for Curriculum for Excellence for East Lothian, successfully developed and delivered a pilot version of PISCES as a module to a group of East Lothian teachers, in 2010/11. The module resulted in successful ‘experiments in practice’ and increased awareness of the benefits of inquiry-based teaching and learning. The same group of teachers have also taken part in a follow-up course (ARIES: Advanced Resources for Inquiry and Evaluation in Science). PISCES is a high quality CPD programme, valued by teachers and supportive of their professional self-development. It can be applied to both primary and secondary teaching, in all science subjects. Pupils benefit from learning experiences, which develop scientific inquiry skills. Feedback from participating teachers has been consistently positive

‘Just give me the answer’: developing pedagogical process knowledge (PPK) as part of practitioner theory in the pursuit of inquiry-based science teaching

This paper describes our experience in working with teachers to think about how to make practice more inquiry-based: one in which we as the academics were thinking in terms of collaboration while the teachers were expecting delivery of a professional development module. Partly, this is the story of the balance found between those expectations through underpinning the PISCES module. Partly, it is an attempt to conceptualise the form of professional learning that evolved

Teachers can overcome challenges to inquiry by developing pedagogical process knowledge (PPK) : the PISCES experience

This chapter tells a story of empowerment through professional learning of teachers participating in a professional learning module (PISCES) in which they developed forms of knowledge that enhanced their theories of practice, or practitioner theory, around how to support student learning through inquiry. It is argued that educational learning is complex and that contexts vary both within and across countries in the project, so teachers have to be trusted as the professionals in situ. Therefore, the model of empowerment used was one of bringing conceptual tools to them to support their thinking about their practice and its current relationship with inquiry and scientific thinking, supporting them in developing questions that would lead to experiments in their practice, and the chance to report on those and learn from each other. These conceptual tools are described. The narrative describes the changes or enhancements to their practice that the teachers developed themselves in order to solve pedagogical problems around inquiry that they had identified using the conceptual tools. These changes are argued to show development of an under conceptualised form of teacher knowledge – namely, knowledge of how to support processes such as inquiry and scientific thinking in their students. This knowledge is made explicit through the concept of PPK that is seen as a partner to the already established concept of PCK and these, together, form an important component of teachers’ theories of practice

Adding pedagogical process knowledge to pedagogical content knowledge : teachers' professional learning and theories of practice in science education

A concept of pedagogical process knowledge (PPK) is introduced to partner pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). This concept arises from observing the learning of teachers engaged in a course supporting them in introducing more inquiry-based methods into their practice. This course aimed to empower teachers through professional learning. PCK alone did not seem adequately to explain the teachers’ learning, which involved them developing new pedagogical processes to support the development of inquiry-based learning processes in their students – hence PPK. Together, PCK and PPK are important constituents of teachers’ theories of practice, although PPK may be often less developed

Empowering teacher collaboration to promote scientific thinking through inquiry : towards lessons for initial teacher education

The Science-Teacher Advanced Methods (S-TEAM) Project aims to enable more teachers effectively to adopt inquiry-based methods through support and access to innovative methods and research-based knowledge, so leading to increased science literacy and uptake of science careers (NTU, undated). This sub-project project aims to contribute through the following rationale. First, through using inquiry-based approaches in science education, we with to facilitate the ability of learners to develop scientific thinking, since being able to think scientifically underpins scientific literacy generally and makes science careers more attractive. Therefore, we need to theorise, in pedagogically useful ways, the connections between investigation in school science and scientific thinking. Third, this theory has to be applied, tested, developed or modified in schools in cooperation with science teachers using inquiry-based approaches to science education. Fourth, lessons from this can be taken to ITE. Following the first two parts of this rationale, a five dimensional model of investigations has been developed (Smith, 2010). Based on Feist (2006), the fifth dimension comprises a sub-model of scientific thinking. Although not aimed at science education, Feist’s work provides powerful arguments for identifying certain cognitive activities as constitutive of scientific thinking. These cognitive activities are (currently, at least) here called aspects of scientific thinking to avoid the over ready assumption that they are skills that can be practiced in isolation. Some aspects of scientific thinking, Feist argues, are found in both the implicit scientific thinking of children and adults, and the explicit scientific thinking of scientists – for example, observation, hypothesis formation and cause and effect thinking. These are fundamental to both everyday and scientific thinking. That is not to say that the thinking of children, adults and scientists is the same in all respects. Other factors differentiate scientific thinking from everyday thinking, including the ability to separate and co-ordinate evidence, forms of visualisation (e.g. models and diagrams), controlling one’s thinking by making it explicit, and using metaphors or analogies. Along with language, these enable thinking to become ‘less and less immediate and sensory-bound and more and more consciously represented, explicit and metacognitive’ (Feist, 2006, p71). The other dimensions of the model allow teachers to ask pedagogical questions concerning the range of investigations they are using – 1) Which form of pupil understanding (Folk or developing scientific) does the investigation relate to? 2) Does it originate from learners’ or teachers’ goals? 3) What issues of control are there for the teachers and pupils? 4) How open or closed is the investigation in terms of breadth of possible outcomes and/or their certainty. The model has been used by the author and two teachers in analysing various examples of investigative activity and found useful in highlighting what aspects of scientific thinking are supported, pedagogical issues that arise and possible improvements (Smith, 2010). The next steps are to work with a group of teachers to apply and develop the model in solving pedagogical issues in making science teaching more inquiry-based within Scotland’s curriculum framework and to take lessons from this to ITE