CYCO
Professional Development
Packages (PDPs)
Teacher Responsiveness to
Student Scientific Inquiry
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Scientific Inquiry
• Diverse interpretations of what is important about inquiry
• Disagreements about the development of abilities for scientific
inquiry:
– Developmental perspective (abilities increase with the students age, as
part of general cognitive development)
– Critique to developmental perspectives (developmental perspectives
have systematically underestimated children’s abilities)
– Perspective that abilities can be explicitly taught as early as in
elementary school
• Disagreements regarding what productive inquiry entails
– Scientific Inquiry refers to:
• the diverse ways in which scientists study the natural world and propose
explanations based on the evidence derived from their work
• the activities of students in which they develop knowledge and understanding
of scientific ideas, as well as an understanding of how scientists study the
natural world
– An important aspect of inquiry is the pursuit of causal, increasingly
coherent explanations of natural phenomena (Hammer, 2004)
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Even given a particular account of
students’ inquiry…
…there is the challenge of monitoring student progress
in class
– Assessing student thinking is challenging work, whether done
during class by "instinct" because there is little time for reflection,
or after class when there is more time for explicit reflection
– There is the challenge of diagnosing student progress in any
particular classroom situation
• Identify → Interpret & Evaluate → Respond
– Teachers need to develop:
• their in-class "instincts," for evaluating what they see and responding
with little reflection
• a repertoire of instructional strategies that they can choose from at
any particular situation in that little time available for teaching
Our purpose in the PDP
• Help teachers to:
– develop a range of teaching strategies that support student
abilities for scientific inquiry
– design and implement inquiry-based science lessons
– move towards incorporating inquiry-based methods in science
teaching and learning
– Identify → Interpret & Evaluate → Respond to their students’ inclass scientific thinking and reasoning abilities
• Increase the effectiveness and efficiency of professional
development in science education in Cyprus by
designing, implementing and evaluating a PDP design
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PDPs
• PDPs design was based on:
– the current needs of science teaching in Cyprus from:
• the perspective of the policy makers
• the perspective of science teachers
– current approaches of:
• teaching Science as inquiry
• teacher professional development
• Area of focus: Develop teacher’s responsiveness to student
scientific inquiry:
– monitor the performance of the learner,
– analyze the nature of the differences between students’ performance
and the target performance, and
– respond and assist appropriately to support the students’ progress
• Length: 3 separate small-scale (ten 3-hour meetings each)
• School level: Kindergarten, Elementary and Middle School
• Science content area of focus: Physical Science
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PDPs’ focal areas
1. Theoretical framework of current approaches for science teaching and
learning
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What is Science? What is Scientific Knowledge and how is this constructed?
Challenges faced in teaching science
Current trends in teaching and learning in Science
Students’ ideas about Science
Inquiry as a process of teaching and learning in science
Conceptual Understanding in Science: different perspectives
Epistemological competence
The development of abilities (e.g., analogical and mechanistic reasoning)
2. Inquiry approaches
– The role of experiments in science teaching and learning
– Uncertainty during experimental measurements
3. Hands- on experiments on “real” science
– Investigation of moon phases
4. Implementation of science lessons
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Principles of lesson plan design for teaching science
Design science lesson plans
Reflection and discussion about videos of exemplary science teaching practices
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Development of teaching practices that support inquiry
What we have done so far
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Literature review
– current issues of science curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and
professional development in Cyprus and in literature
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Data collection and analysis
– Investigated the current needs of science teaching in Cyprus from:
• the perspective of the policy makers
– national workshop (inspectors, science teacher educators, curriculum designers)
– how they view and understand IBST/E
– what their expectations from in-service science teachers are
• the perspective of science teachers
– method of focus group discussion (inquiry in science teaching and learning)
– twenty in-service teachers in two groups for about 90 minutes
– Videotaped examples of exemplary science teaching
• prompts for teacher’s reflection
– Teaching practices for supporting student inquiry in science
• identified patterns of “instructional practices” that support student inquiry
• what exemplary science teaching in terms of IBST/E looks like in authentic
contexts
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Development of PDPs
What we do now: Implement PDPs
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WP6 the coming months (CYCO)
• Implementation of the PDPs
– Collection of pilot data for evaluation of the PDP
• Evaluation of the PDPs
– Analysis of data
• Revisions to PDPs
• Book chapter
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Evaluation of PDPs
• Pre- and post-interviews about teachers’:
• pedagogical knowledge,
• pedagogical content knowledge and
• epistemological knowledge about teaching and learning in science through
inquiry
– Pre-interviews: data related to the current needs of the science teacher
who will participate in the implementation of PDP
– Post-interviews: will allow teachers to express their comments about
the PDP and its effectiveness on their teaching and way of learning
• Teachers reflective discussions:
– Based on segments of videotaped lessons from different exemplary
science teachers in Cyprus (variety of topics)
– Teachers will:
• discuss issues related to:
– the nature of science
– the characteristics of effective science teaching and
– the various forms of inquiry teaching and learning in science
• be prompted to try and develop their in-class "instincts”
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Evaluation of PDPs
• Teachers enactment
– At the beginning of PDP: teachers will teach a lesson in a way
that portrays his/her usual teaching practice
– During PDP: teachers will teach at least 2 more lessons that will
be designed collaboratively with other teachers and researchers
• Teacher-designed science lessons
– During PDP teachers will:
• learn more about the aims, goals and objectives of an IBST/E
science lesson
• be provided with guidance to plan appropriate content, learning
opportunities and evaluation strategies for students
• develop, discuss and implement science lesson plans
• enact pedagogical strategies
• use materials
• administer assessments associated with particular curriculum
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Refinement of PDPs
• The process of collecting and analyzing data during the
implementation of the training packages that we will
produce, will be used to:
– document aspects of the design, development, implementation
and validation of the training packages,
– enable the subsequent refinement and revision of PDPs
– inform design decisions about future professional development
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Our ideas about our Case Study chapter
• Through the activities (discussion-reflection-planningimplementation) of PDPs, teachers will be engaged in a
process of action research studying and reflecting on
their own practices. We want to focus on this process in
order to:
– Develop case studies of teachers
– Describe their process of professional development
– Describe the effectiveness of the PDP design
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Principles for teacher PDP
• The following principles are primarily the result of two
data sources:
– The needs from the Cyprus Education system
– The ways that other European countries have used to address the
same needs through teachers’ PDPs
• Proposed Cyprus PDP’s principles:
– School – based
– Participating teachers identify the focus area(s) of the PDPs based
on their daily teaching needs
– Relate theoretical pedagogical principles to daily teaching practice
– Use reflection on daily teaching practices
– Relate to the National Curriculum
– Long – term systematic Professional development
– Quality assessment
– Collaboration with the wider education community
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