Exploring the variability in how educators attend to science classroom interactions

Title of Document: EXPLORING THE VARIABILITY IN HOW EDUCATORS ATTEND TO SCIENCE CLASSROOM INTERACTIONS Colleen Elizabeth Gillespie, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Directed By: Associate Professor Andrew Elby, Department of Teaching, Learning, Policy, and Leadership Many researchers assert that educators must develop a shared instructional vision in order for schools to be effective. While this research tends to focus on educators’ alignment around goals of science classrooms, in this dissertation I argue that we can’t assume that educators agree on what they see when they look at science classrooms. Recent work has explored teacher attention when watching a classroom episode, and in this dissertation I expand that work to explore leaders’ attention in addition to teachers' attention. Specifically, I explore the variability in what teachers and leaders notice in science classroom episodes and how they reason about what they notice. I ground my studies in real classroom practice: a videotaped lesson in the first study and a live classroom observation in the second. In Chapter 2, I discuss the importance of grounding discussions about teaching and learning in classroom artifacts, a commitment that motivates my dissertation: educators may have a shared vision when discussing teaching and learning in the abstract but disagree about whether that vision is being realized in a classroom. I then illustrate this phenomenon with my own vision for science teaching and learning. I first describe what I consider to be good teaching and learning in the abstract, a description that I expect all readers to agree with. I then describe and analyze the video clip I used in my interviews, highlighting moments that I consider to be good teaching and learning. I argue that discussing teaching and learning in the context of this episode not only gives a much clearer picture of what I think good teaching and learning is but also gives the reader something to analyze herself and compare her interpretations with mine. In Chapter 3, I present my first study, in which I showed this episode to 15 different science teachers, science instructional leaders, and principals. I found that participants attended to many different features in the episode, which led to significant disagreement about what is happening in the episode. Additionally, I found that these differences in attention corresponded to differences in how participants were framing the activity of watching the clip. In Chapter 4, I explore the attentional variability of one science instructional leader, Valerie, in multiple contexts. In addition to interviewing Valerie about the videotaped lesson, I also observed Valerie engage in an “observation cycle” with a teacher. In all of her teacher observation cycles, Valerie is required to use a district-mandated observation rubric. Even though Valerie is quite skilled at attending to student thinking in some contexts, I found that Valerie’s attention is strongly context-dependent and gets pulled away from students’ scientific thinking when she uses a district-mandated form. Finally, in Chapter 5 I summarize my findings and describe the implications my work has for both research and practice. I argue that educators must first become more aware of the pulls on their attention to more thoughtfully navigate the complex demands of the classroom. I also call for districts to be more cautious in their adoption of observation tools that might pull observers' attention away from the disciplinary practices that recent educational reforms champion. I consider some alternatives to these observation tools such as distributing the task of classroom observation to disciplinary experts. Finally, I discuss implications for how researchers and educators can work to develop truly shared instructional vision. EXPLORING THE VARIABILITY IN HOW EDUCATORS ATTEND TO SCIENCE CLASSROOM INTERACTIONS