Grade 5 Inquiry Project Curriculum Discussions 2011-2012

In the year 2011-2012, we video-taped and transcribed four classroom discussions led by three teachers from the Grade 5 sample, as they participated in the Talk Science professional development program and enacted the Inquiry Project curriculum, both for the first time. The teachers were Ms. Carson, Ms. Silvia, and Ms. Bates (teacher names appearing here are pseudonyms). During the approximately ten-week long professional development program, teachers used web-based resources to develop their practice in promoting students’ science learning: they studied video cases depicting exemplary classroom discussions to become familiar with four types of science discussions — elicitation, data, explanation, and consolidation discussions — and with various academically productive talk moves (APT moves) to lead the discussions. Teachers also studied scientist cases to understand the science more deeply, and to understand how scientists reason and talk about phenomena.

The findings presented here focus on teachers’ use of the APT moves to facilitate various science discussions in their classrooms. We conceptualized the APT moves as talk tools for teachers to utilize in leading classroom discussions. In conceptualizing the APT moves as tools, the underlying expectation was that with support, teachers would begin to use the moves strategically to suit the emergent teaching and learning needs in their classrooms. We did not expect that teachers would use the various APT moves uniformly in the discussions, or consistently increase or decrease their use of particular types of talk moves over time, or even use the moves in each of their turns at talk. Instead, the professional development program was designed to help teachers develop their practice by identifying appropriate talk moves to incorporate into their facilitation while guiding discussions. We examined four discussions led by each of the three teachers to understand how they used various talk moves in facilitating their classroom discourse, and how their students participated in and reasoned about the science during the discussions. The discussions were video taped and transcribed and occurred during two lessons early in the curriculum (Investigations 5 and 6), and two lessons late in the curriculum (Investigations 16 and 17).

Our initial research plan was to study temporal changes in classroom discourse as teachers participated in the Talk Science program. However, a careful examination of the classroom discussion transcripts revealed that the four lessons selected for analysis each lent itself to a different type of discussion. For example, the discussion for Investigation 5 required students to formulate claims and provide evidence from their measurement data, whereas the discussion for Investigation 6 required students to propose initial ideas regarding the process of evaporation from their classroom observations and prior experiences instead of measurement data. Therefore, to understand better teachers’ facilitation and students’ participation during these discussions, one needed to know the science investigation framing the discussion, and the learning goals of the discussion. Each of the four lessons involved a different kind of investigation and learning goals, and these differences appeared to have shaped the emerging classroom interactions. The transcripts showed that teachers’ facilitation and students’ reasoning varied according to the learning goals and science investigations guiding the discussions. In other words, a simple temporal analysis of changes in teachers’ facilitation over time was no longer appropriate owing to the differences in the nature of the discussions. Hence, in analyzing the data, we focused less on overarching temporal changes and more on how teachers used particular talk moves and how students reasoned about the science by considering carefully the investigations and learning goals shaping the discussions.

As stated before, the Talk Science program provided video cases on four broad types of science discussions: Elicitation, Data, Explanation, and Consolidation Discussions. The general purpose of these discussions was to enable students to make meaning of their classroom investigations and experiences, but each discussion also had a particular focus. The four foci of the discussions were as follows: eliciting students’ initial ideas; interpreting data; generating explanations; and consolidating understanding. The reader should note that the four discussions we selected for video recording and included in this analysis mapped on to one of the four types of discussions that were presented in the video cases. Below is a table with contextual information on the four discussions we selected for analysis from the Inquiry Project curriculum, and how these relate to the four types of discussions depicted in the Talk Science video cases.