Teachers as Curriculum Designers: Understanding STEM Pedagogical Design Capacity

Abstract

Background/Context: Science is in the midst of reform, shifting away from teaching science and mathematics in isolation from one another, toward a model that prioritizes integration of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning environments. Since teachers are the most important factor in determining the success and sustainability of reform ideals (Luft & Hewson, 2014), understanding how to effectively support the professional learning of teachers to plan, teach and assess integrated STEM curriculum is essential to STEM reform. Purpose/Focus of Study: This dissertation presents a model for understanding how to support and facilitate collaborative teacher design teams engaged in STEM curriculum development. The study focuses on co-development, collaboration, and refinement of integrated STEM curriculum units, and the social construction of knowledge as the teacher design team examines student work and redesigns curriculum. The study is framed around the theoretical construct of the reciprocal relationship between teachers and curriculum -- how teachers’ design and use of curriculum is influenced by the curricular resource itself. At the same time, the materials “change, move, perturb, and inform” (Bruner, 1977, p. xv) to advance teachers’ knowledge through use. Underlying curriculum use, is a set of resource tools, some physical and others intellectual, that teachers bring to designing instruction that affects decisions about how to interact with curriculum: to use with relative fidelity (offload), to make changes that preserve the core ideas in the curriculum (adapt), or make significant changes that reflect the teacher’s knowledge and skills (improvise). Decisions to offload, adapt or improvise curriculum materials can be understood by close analysis of interactions between the resources that informed the decisions. Intervention: The analysis of teacher professional learning is typically approached by measuring outcomes such as teacher or student learning (Brown, 2002). However, pedagogical design capacity (PDC) suggests an alternative method for understanding teacher professional growth as a process. The method consists of (i) identifying aspects that characterize curricular resources (procedures, domain representation, physical object); (ii) identifying aspects that characterize teacher resources (subject matter knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, teacher goals and beliefs); and (iii) investigating how the former and the latter interact to inform decisions to offload, adapt or improvise with curriculum materials. In addition, evaluation of professional learning is often approached with the focus on individual teachers. However, the teachers in this study worked in teacher design teams. Therefore, the collaborative approach necessitated a model that honored and supported the knowledge, goals and experiences of the group. To support collaborative work, and to examine the effects of collaborative redesign of the STEM curriculum, two protocol interventions were developed. These facilitated the teams’ post-implementation examination of student work (Looking at Student Work protocol) and redesign of curriculum (Thinking Through a Task protocol). Research Design Approach: A multiple-case study research design was used to take advantage of analytic benefits that support viability of outcomes for theoretical generalization (Yin, 2014). Three teacher design teams were selected from multiple schools across a large urban district. The three cases were contrasting in nature (Yin, 2014), in that they allowed for investigation of variability across elementary and middle school contexts, across 3rd-6th grades, and across Earth Science and Physical Science. The design choice of contrasting cases was made to illustrate similar and different strategies for PDC development. The analytic approach consisted of individual case analysis, followed by cross-case synthesis to build upon the knowledge generated from analysis of individual cases. Cross-case synthesis is an analysis strategy that embodies making a “new whole out of the parts,” with the goal of making unique connections and interpretations that could not be made from individual case analysis (Cruzes, Dybå, Runeson, & Höst, 2015, introduction para. 5, 2015). Conclusions/Recommendations: This study found that collaborative resources were important tools the teams drew upon to hone and clarify their ideas about STEM curriculum. Two of the collaborative resources were not surprising: (i) protocol and facilitation strategies; (ii) co-design and evaluation of assessment tools. However, storytelling was an unanticipated finding. The teams used individual storytelling to share classroom events, they used co-storytelling to co-construction meaning, and parallel storytelling to introduce previous related experiences. Storytelling served as a resource to grow their STEM PDC. This study’s findings led to an adaptation of the Design Capacity Enactment Framework (Brown, 2002) that includes a new category of resources -- Collaborative Resources. This new model suggests that professional development for STEM reform can be enhanced by deliberate consideration of collaborative resources, in addition to curricular and teacher resources.