Student-Centered Pedagogy in Biology: Developing a Responsive Teaching Professional Development for Graduate Student Teaching Assistants.
Simon, Matthew R.
2018
- A qualifying paper submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Education. Abstract: Responsive teaching is an approach to pedagogy that encourages teachers to elicit, notice, attend to and respond to the substance of student thinking. There is evidence that this style of instruction in STEM classrooms can increase student depth of understanding of ... read moretopics as well as encourage more equitable participation and self confidence in students. The inherent uncertainty about what kinds of ideas students might have and how best to respond to those ideas can make responsive teaching challenging for practitioners. Novice teachers may feel particularly challenged to grant students agency over their ideas and allow students to interrogate non-standard knowledge. Our broad goal is to design a professional development for a particular group of novice teachers – graduate student teaching assistants – to help train them to incorporate responsive practices into their teaching methods. The more specific goals of this paper are to explicate the benefits and challenges of this approach to instruction and then to explore the literature on teacher training to begin to design and develop the professional development. We intend to design the professional development to build on resources that these novice teachers may already possess – topical expertise and openness to multiple teaching strategies – and to use methods present in prior studies to most effectively train our teaching assistants to begin to draw out, listen for and respond to student thinking and ideas in biological science.read less
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- ng451v907
- Component ID:
- tufts:sd.0000920
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