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Strategy One: Analyzing Children's Thinking
The first strategy involves the analysis of children's thinking through the use of digital videos that record clinical interviews documenting the preconceptions of individual children. Preservice teachers devise interview protocols that address core scientific ideas (e.g., seasons, moon phases, heat transfer, photosynthesis, current flow) so that they can hear first-hand a child's contrary notions as well as his or her reasons and explanations. Confronting commonly held misconceptions requires teachers to guide students to a sense of dissatisfaction with their understanding of what they think they know. These interviews help preservice teachers to identify access points into the children's beliefs, which stimulates ideas for ways to use contrary evidence to perturb children's non-scientific thinking.
Sharing these videos allows my students to see a wider variety of children's thinking. Prospective teachers use these iMovies to ground their reading assignments in real-life examples. In response to these examples they can design elementary lesson plans and respond in their journals. Once my students have identified children's thinking about such questions as "Why do leaves change color?" or "Where do stars go during the day?" our task is to identify which teaching strategies might be most appropriate for addressing misconceptions.
(Link to iMovie, example 1.)
Part of learning to teach well involves learning to listen carefully and weigh fully the beliefs of children as we plan, instruct, and evaluate. After analyzing the examples of children's thinking shown in the iMovies, more teachers choose open-ended questions as the basis for their planned lessons. Before I began to use the digital videos, preservice teachers rarely designed lessons focusing on central questions that require children to use scientific processes to gather evidence and construct their own interpretations. Instead, their lessons typically would focus upon transmitting factual knowledge about science topics like the five senses or the food pyramid or volcanoes. In contrast, during the most recent semester of the course, students developed lessons around such questions as, "How do we know there are just nine planets?" "Why is food different for plants and animals?" "How can we hear?" "Why do some things sink and some float?" "Is the life cycle for spiders the same as for butterflies?" "Where does water on the playground go on a hot day?" The lessons now reflect a greater respect for children's abilities and knowledge, and teachers further extend their own knowledge by sharing their iMovies with each other and comparing their interview results.
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