This commentary highlights the urgent need to re-envision climate and environmental education in response to the escalating climate crisis and its far-reaching social, ecological, and political implications. As young people increasingly express concern for their futures, the authors call for a transformational change in science education that engages with climate change as a complex and pressing issue. To support such transformation, the commentary introduces a new section in the journal Science Education titled "Climate Change and Environmental Education," providing a platform for empirical research, conceptual inquiries, and policy discourse on education's role in addressing planetary change. This section invites scholarship that expands our understanding of climate change and environmental education through transdisciplinary and justice-oriented approaches. Key areas of inquiry include learning across spaces, disciplines, and epistemologies, action-oriented learning through community-based and participatory approaches, and attending to emotional well-being while using action to cultivate hope. By advancing these conversations, researchers can critically examine how education fosters the knowledge, agency, and ethical commitments necessary for engaging with the complexities of climate change.

Preservice teacher performance assessments, such as the edTPA, are one of the accountability policies from states and local authorities designed to ensure the quality of beginning teachers and standardize teacher education. We studied experiences of 65 preservice teachers regarding the effect of the edTPA on their learning in field-placement classrooms. These cases revealed that the edTPA created "protected teaching spaces" for participants to experiment with student-centered instructional practices supported in university courses and codified in edTPA rubrics. This was especially impactful for novices who previously had limited opportunities to try out equitable reform-oriented instruction in their placements. In these cases, the edTPA also helped mitigate inequities in learning to teach, an unintended outcome that is important for policymakers to consider when deciding on credentialing requirements.

The clinical experience of preservice teachers can provide rich opportunities for them to learn about the work of teaching, but for many novices the opportunities are more limited because their host classroom does not reflect the type of instruction that they learn in their university coursework. Without these opportunities, preservice teachers (PSTs) may not get to apply, experiment with, and internalize the research-based teaching practices they are trained with. To address this challenge, this chapter looks at how the teacher education program, novice’s professional agency, and mentor openness can work together to open up new learning opportunities for teacher candidates facing the “two-worlds pitfall.” We interviewed and surveyed 63 teacher candidates throughout their clinical placement. Based on their reports, we coded the placement for its congruence with the PST’s university coursework. For candidates in low congruence placements, we analyzed their learning opportunities over time and the role of the three factors (university structures, PST agency, and mentor openness) in creating those opportunities. We use the story of three preservice teachers to illustrate how the factors can work in isolation but can also work together to create more frequent and more meaningful opportunities to learn how to teach with effective and equitable practices. Teacher education programs, teacher candidates, and mentor teachers all have a role to play in preparing teachers who are ready to work in high-need classrooms. As such, we have recommendations for how all three groups can create opportunities to learn about teaching during the clinical placement, even when the host classroom and the university are not fully aligned.

In this study, we document pre-service teachers’ (PSTs) opportunities to learn about planning for equitable and ambitious instruction during clinical placements. We also test whether these opportunities vary by the level of participants’ perceived congruence between the vision of science teaching supported in their university coursework and the instructional practices and learning culture of their host classrooms. We analyzed interview and survey responses of 65 science PSTs from three preparation programs which required their novices to learn about planning and teaching that was consistent with research-based reforms. In placements where novices could participate in planning practices that were perceived as congruent with these reform-based visions, they were more likely than peers in low-congruence classrooms to engage in educative co-planning with a mentor, to take up responsibilities for planning lessons earlier in the school year and for longer periods of time, and to receive useful feedback from mentors.

Agency has been used as a lens to focus on how educators learn through pedagogical risk-taking, advocacy for curricular reform, and resisting policies that are not focused on the needs of students. We explored the role of agency as 65 preservice science teachers created learning opportunities for themselves during their clinical placements. Specifically, we investigated whether the types of agentive episodes varied by the level of congruence novices perceived between the vision of science teaching supported in their university coursework and the prevailing practices and culture of their host classrooms. Interview and survey data of participants from three preparation programs indicate that those in highly congruent placements experienced earlier and more mentor-scaffolded opportunities to take on active roles in teaching, and exercised agency to extend research-informed practices or tools they observed their mentors using. This resulted in participants seeing the richness of students' thinking and how capable they were of challenging work, given strategic supports. Those in low congruence placements had fewer chances to play active roles in teaching, were more likely to draw upon agency to make minor adjustments as they emulated their mentors' instructionally conservative lessons, and expressed concern they were "getting better" at aspects of teaching they viewed as inequitable or less responsive to students. Regardless of congruence, however, even simple acts of agency such as asking mentors to explain their instructional decisions were remarkably rare.

In science classrooms, the epistemic practices of explanation building and argumentation often extend over multiple episodes of talk during a single lesson or across several lessons. Analyzing this kind of discourse requires a way to identify patterns that emerge over time to better understand student participation and how teachers support students' disciplinary work. In this paper, we share the development of a unique graphic representation of classroom talk which we call barcodes. These barcodes assisted our analysis of when and how, over multiple points in a school year, three elementary science teachers facilitated students' science sensemaking during whole-class discussions in ways that ended up promoting, sustaining, or constraining students' collective development of ideas. Barcodes allowed us to see that each teacher regularly engaged students in rigorous whole-class talk over a school year, yet each classroom had distinct patterns of teacher involvement and activity sequences that preceded or co-occurred with these conversations. Paired with transcripts, barcodes illuminated a relationship between teacher responsiveness to specific student ideas and higher discursive rigor. Finally, iterative cross-referencing between barcodes and transcripts sparked further inquiries into supportive conditions for talk that were not as apparent using transcripts alone. In this way, the barcode functioned both as an analytical tool and a final visualization of discourse events in a series of lessons from grades 5 and 6 science classrooms.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsKelsie FowlerKelsie Fowler (knp7@uw.edu) is a doctoral student in Science Education and Mark Windschitl (mwindschitl@uw.edu) is a Professor of Science Teaching and Learning, both in the College of Education at the University of Washington, Seattle. Claus Auning (caun@ucsyd.dk) is a lecturer in Teacher Education at the University of College Syddanmark, Haderslev, DenmarkMark WindschitlKelsie Fowler (knp7@uw.edu) is a doctoral student in Science Education and Mark Windschitl (mwindschitl@uw.edu) is a Professor of Science Teaching and Learning, both in the College of Education at the University of Washington, Seattle. Claus Auning (caun@ucsyd.dk) is a lecturer in Teacher Education at the University of College Syddanmark, Haderslev, DenmarkClaus AuningKelsie Fowler (knp7@uw.edu) is a doctoral student in Science Education and Mark Windschitl (mwindschitl@uw.edu) is a Professor of Science Teaching and Learning, both in the College of Education at the University of Washington, Seattle. Claus Auning (caun@ucsyd.dk) is a lecturer in Teacher Education at the University of College Syddanmark, Haderslev, Denmark

AbstractWithin the context of schooling, conceptions of literacy are increasingly being associated with the capacity for learners to engage in disciplinary meaning making through face‐to‐face deliberation and dialogue. In this commentary, the author explores how a conversational infrastructure—meaning routines for talk, norms, scaffolds, and a repertoire of talk moves—can help teachers foster a discourse community in their classrooms. Such an infrastructure can support students of all backgrounds to explore, through discourse, how claims are made by members of a discipline, what counts as evidence, and the ground rules by which members of a knowledge‐building community can engage one another in justifying certain points of view while acknowledging alternatives. This vision is presented as an alternative to the unspoken rules and rituals that sociologists refer to as doing school, which serve to constrain academically productive talk in many classrooms.

In this article, we summarize more than a decade of work on high-leverage practices being used in the context of science teacher preparation. We describe the challenges and insights that ultimately resulted in more robust practices, a diversified suite of tools to support these practices, expanded knowledge of our own teacher education pedagogies, and stronger bonds between our preparation program and its local network of K-12 schools. The special education community has now formulated an ambitious practice-based vision for professional preparation, and advocates will find our narratives to be a mix of cautionary tales and cause for optimism.

Each chapter in this section carries an implicit but powerful message that "sensemaking is not just for children." Indeed, one of the most important take-aways is that novices should be making sense of instructional practices and the role they play in the larger work of compassionate and effective teaching. We, as teacher educators, are pressed to do our own sensemaking by using the cases presented in this book to interrogate conceptions of effective preparation pedagogies, perhaps even questioning some of our assumptions about the promise and limits of practice-oriented approaches to support novice learning.

•Rehearsals of teaching practice function as a bridge from methods to the classroom.•Organizational tools help increase the visual representations during discussions.•Elements of framing and closing discussions are taken up less to the classroom.•Talk moves are taken up extensively in rehearsals and the classroom.•Explicit representations of practice are most often taken up by novice teachers.

Background/Context Teacher preparation suffers from a lack of evidence that guides the design of learning experiences to produce well-prepared beginners. An increasing number of teacher educators are experimenting with practice-embedded approaches to prepare novices for ambitious instruction. This study examines the role of core instructional practices introduced during preparatory experiences in shaping novices’ first-year teaching. Research design Employing a mixed-methods approach, we compare the first-year teaching of two groups of individuals with secondary science certification, one of which comprises graduates from a practice-embedded preparation program, and the other graduates from programs that did not feature practice-embedded preparation. A total of 116 science lessons taught by 41 first-year teachers were analyzed, focusing on the quality of student opportunities to learn (OTL) observed during the lessons. Research questions This study sought answers to two research questions: 1) What are the characteristics of students’ OTL from first-year teachers, one group of whom learned a set of core instructional practices during their preparation program and the other group of whom were not exposed to core practices? 2) Who provides opportunities for students to engage in meaningful disciplinary practices as outlined in the Next Generation Science Standards, during the first year of teaching, if any? How did they create such opportunities? Findings Independent-sample t-tests showed that there are significant mean differences between the two groups (t=3.1∼8.9; p <.001), on four metrics associated with their students’ opportunities to learn. In-depth qualitative case studies reveal two ways that core practices shape instruction in new teachers’ classrooms: (a) they support novices in formulating an actionable curricular vision as advocated by the science education community, and (b) they appear to help novices notice, attend to, and build upon students’ ideas in classrooms with the use of strategies and tools recommended by the program. Conclusions/Recommendations A focus on a set of strategic and intentional practices, designed to help teachers achieve rigorous and equitable learning goals, has potential as a curricular frame for teacher preparation. But the emphasis should be placed on the vision and pedagogical goals that underlie the core practices, rather than the ungrounded use of strategies or tools themselves.

The foundational document of the current science standards movementthe Framework for K-12 Science Educationis grounded in research about how students from diverse backgrounds learn science and the conditions under which they can participate in knowledge-building activities of the discipline. We argue that teacher educators should use powerful principles for instruction, derived from the research referenced in the Framework, to inform the design of courses and other preparatory experiences for novices. This implementation strategy contrasts with an alignment approach, in which novices would be asked to familiarize themselves with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), integrate student performance expectations into lesson plans, and teach activities similar to those described in the NGSS. We describe the more principled approach as a three-story challenge in which students, teachers, and teacher educators have responsibilities to learn and to take up new roles in the educational system that are fundamentally different from the status quo.

Rehearsal is an increasingly important teacher education pedagogy. We explore how 3 science teacher educators thought about and used pauses within rehearsals to support secondary science teacher candidates in learning to facilitate sense-making discussions. Video data indicated that the most common purposes for pausing a rehearsal were to provide feedback about the candidate's practice and to problem solve with the candidates. Substantively, the most common foci were attending to student thinking and attending to the use of language. Interview data indicated that teacher educators responded to candidates' needs when making decisions about pauses. These findings suggest that rehearsals can provide rich learning opportunities for teacher candidates in ways that are interactive and responsive to students' ideas.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The title of this article highlights a view of science learning uncommon in schools today--one in which teachers and students view misconceptions as useful for making sense of the world (NRC 2008). What are misconceptions? Many consider them to be student ideas inconsistent with science and sometimes hard to change. One example is the idea that A ball eventually stops after I push it because the ball 'holds force' until the force runs and stops. While we teachers may be tempted to quickly reject the idea of objects holding force, simply telling students the idea is incorrect has little effect on their thinking. Such ideas might, however, become part of a sense-making conversation that can support reasoning and learning. By sense-making, we simply mean working on and with ideas--both students' ideas (including experiences, language, and ways of knowing) and authoritative ideas in texts and other materials--in ways that help generate meaningful connections. This can involve asking students to talk about their thinking, to compare ideas, to test these ideas, and to see if they can be used to explain natural events and processes. These types of reasoning episodes occur often during students' engagement with science practices such as arguing from evidence, constructing explanations, or revising models. Learning as sense-making is emphasized in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States 2013). In the past, when students have offered explanations inconsistent with science (such as ascribing the seasons to the changing distance between the Earth and the Sun), these ideas were seen as problematic misconceptions needing to be stamped out by the teacher with the correct ideas stamped in. In this strategy, the teacher generally asked students to replace the idea with the correct one (such as the tilt of the Earth and its revolution around the Sun causing the seasons). While providing accurate scientific information to students is useful, an early focus on finding and fixing misconceptions can confuse students about why their own ideas aren't accurate and fails to engage students in reasoning or idea revision. When their misconceptions are corrected, students learn that their own ideas need to be replaced by other ideas that they don't fully understand. When this happens, students will likely memorize official school knowledge but fall back on their original ideas when thinking about and explaining the outside world, since they naturally reason with their own real-world experiences, language, and rules for validating claims. More recently, a resources perspective on learning has offered an alternative to repairing misconceptions (diSessa 1993; Hammer et al. 2005; Warren et al. 2001). Rather than seeing student knowledge from a deficit view, where wrong answers need to be eliminated, a resources perspective emphasizes how students can reason with different kinds of valuable knowledge to make sense of new situations and ideas. These resources include partial understandings, nonstandard ideas, everyday experiences and ways of talking. In this view, students activate the ideas, experiences, or language they think will help develop explanations or solve problems in the particular context (e.g., the social and physical environment) in which they find themselves. The NGSS uses this resources perspective and prioritizes sense-making in advocating for a new vision for science teaching. The goal is for students to engage in science and engineering practices as they use their developing understanding of disciplinary core ideas and crosscutting concepts to make sense of phenomena or solve problems. Science and engineering practices are tools the classroom community uses to recognize when an idea is or isn't productive in the context in which it is being used. If students have the guidance and space to reason aloud with one another, they can fill the classroom with ideas about how to solve problems and why the ideas make sense in the particular context being examined (Cohen and Ball 1990). …

Background/Context: There are few examples from classrooms or the literature that provide a clear vision of teaching that simultaneously promotes rigorous disciplinary activity and is responsive to all students. Maintaining rigorous and equitable classroom discourse is a worthy goal, yet there is no clear consensus of how this actually works in a classroom.Focus of Study: What does highly rigorous and responsive talk sound like and how is this dialogue embedded in the social practices and activities of classrooms? Our aim was to examine student and teacher interactions in classroom episodes (warm-ups, small-group conversations, whole-group conversation, etc.) and contribute to a growing body of research that specifies equity in classroom practice.Research Design: This mixed-method study examines differences in discourse within and across classroom episodes (warm-ups, small-group conversations, whole-group conversation, etc.) that elevated, or failed to elevate, students' explanatory rigor in equitable ways. Data include 222 secondary science lessons (1,174 episodes) from 37 novice teachers. Lessons were videotaped and analyzed for the depth of students' explanatory talk and the quality of responsive dialogue.Findings: The findings support three statistical claims. First, high levels of rigor cannot be attained in classrooms where teachers are unresponsive to students' ideas or puzzlements. Second, the architecture of a lesson matters. Teachers and students engaging in highly rigorous and responsive lessons turned potentially trivial episodes (such as warm-ups) of science activity into robust learning experiences, connected to other episodes in the same lesson. Third, episodes featuring one or more forms of responsive talk elevated rigor. There were three forms of responsive talk observed in classrooms: building on students' science ideas, attending to students' participation in the learning community, and folding in students' lived experiences. Small but strategic moves within these forms were consequential for supporting rigor.Conclusions/Recommendations: This paper challenges the notion that rigor and responsiveness are attributes of curricula or individual teachers. Rigorous curriculum is necessary but not sufficient for ambitious and equitable science learning experiences; the interactions within the classroom are essential for sustaining the highest quality of scientific practice and sense-making. The data supported the development of a framework that articulates incremental differences in supporting students' explanatory rigor and three dimensions of responsiveness. We describe implications for using this framework in the design of teacher programs and professional development models.

ABSTRACTTeaching that is responsive to students’ ideas can create opportunities for rigorous sense‐making talk by young learners. Yet we have few accounts of how thoughtful attempts at responsive teaching unfold across units of instruction in elementary science classrooms and have only begun to understand how responsiveness encourages rigor in conversations. In this study, the first author taught an electric circuits unit to four upper elementary science classes, exercising a responsive teaching stance. We found that rigorous episodes of whole‐class talk were associated with the teacher's use of open‐ended questions, follow‐up prompts, references to activity or representations, prediscussion tasks, and asking students to comment on their peers’ ideas. Overall, higher rigor talk co‐occurred with these conditions when used in combination. Despite being responsive to students’ emerging ideas, all four classes addressed the science ideas for the unit—an outcome we attribute to the use of an anchoring phenomenon and the teacher's awareness of the concepts required to construct evidence‐based explanations for it. Finally, concerted attempts to teach in responsive ways—while also attending to rigor—surfaced pedagogical tensions that problematize efforts to create such discourse‐rich environments and inform how this type of instruction might be enacted by others.