The use of the Interconnected Model of Teacher Professional Growth for understanding the development of science teachers’ knowledge on models and modelling

Abstract

Models play an important role in science education. However, previous research has revealed that science teachers’ content knowledge, curricular knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge on models and modelling are often incomplete or inadequate. From this perspective, a research project was designed which aimed at the development of beginning science teachers’ knowledge in this domain. In this project, the Interconnected Model of Teacher Professional Growth [Clarke, D., & Hollingsworth, H. (2002). Teaching and Teacher Education, 18(8), 947–967] was used as the basic framework for the establishment of the relationships between the different data gathered in characterising teachers’ knowledge on models and modelling. In this paper, the whole framework of the research is presented, as is some evidence of how powerful this framework was in helping us to understand the development of the teachers’ knowledge.

Introduction

There is a general agreement in the educational research community about the importance of teachers’ professional development as one of the ways to improve education. However, there is no consensus about how such a process occurs and how it can be analysed and promoted. This may be because it was only in the last decades that the nature and development of teachers’ knowledge started to be understood by educational researchers (Munby, Russel, & Martin, 2001).

According to Sprinthall, Reiman, and Thies-Sprinthall (1996), there have been three main general models for explaining teachers’ development: the craft, the expert, and the interactive models. The first model advocates the view that teachers develop as a result of becoming experienced teachers. In this case, knowledge emerges from classroom experiences. However, the model does not make clear how teachers produce new meanings from their experiences nor why some teachers only reproduce the same experience many times without learning from it.

The expert model is focused on teachers’ being taught what and how to do by experts. As discussed by Clarke and Hollingsworth (2002), for a long time changes in teachers’ knowledge have been assumed to be the results of ‘training’, that is, of something that is done to teachers and in which they are relatively passive participants. Moreover, the outcomes of such changes are generally ‘measured’ at the end of the training. This situation may be compared with the application of a test to students at the end of the teaching of a given curricular topic, in which good results cannot be associated with the learning of the topic.

In order to support teachers’ knowledge building, many researchers have recognised that such processes should involve active meaningful learning. This is the basis of what Sprinthall et al. (1996) characterised as interactive models. Although models characterised as interactive present particularities concern with how teachers’ learning is both analysed and supported, they assume the occurrence of a process of changing prior knowledge with some help from experts. Within this perspective, one of the models proposed for teachers’ professional growth was the one by Clarke and Hollingsworth (2002), called the Interconnected Model of Teacher Professional Growth (IMTPG). Their model is represented in Fig. 1 and briefly explained below.

According to this model, the teachers’ world is constituted by four distinct domains that change through the mediating processes of ‘reflection’ and ‘enactment’ (represented as arrows linking the domains). The multiplicity of possible pathways between the domains reflects the complexity of teachers’ professional development. Moreover, the authors explain that

The term “enactment” was chosen to distinguish the translation of a belief or a pedagogical model into action from simply “acting”, on the grounds that acting occurs in the domain of practice, and each action represents the enactment of something a teacher knows, believes or has experienced (Clarke & Hollingsworth, 2002, p. 951).

In the present study, the focus was on the development of science teachers’ knowledge on models and modelling. According to the authors of the IMTPG, if we focus our attention on teacher knowledge,

teacher growth becomes a process of the construction of a variety of knowledge types (content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge) by individual teachers in response to their participation in the experiences provided by the professional development program and through their participation in the classroom (Clarke & Hollingsworth, 2002, p. 955).

Because this perspective fits well with our belief that teachers should be actively involved in a process of knowledge building in order to develop their knowledge, we decided to use the IMTPG as the basic framework for designing a professional development project, as part of a teacher training programme. We also used the IMTPG as a framework for analysing our data. The main aim of this paper is to make evident both how we conducted our analysis and how the use of the IMTPG as an analytical framework supported our understanding of teachers’ knowledge growth that occurred within the context of a professional development project concerned with models and modelling in science.