Much of my work has concerned exploring students' ideas in science, including how their ideas relate to each other, and change over time. This is an area of work which is fascinating in its own terms, but is also important to inform teaching. Research into student thinking informs teachers of learners' likely starting points in topics, and of likely learning difficulties.
Read about Learners' conceptions and thinking
Research into how students' conceptions can develop can inform the development of classroom pedagogy.
Read about Pedagogy
Read blog postings related to science teaching
Science is highly conceptual, so teaching science involves teaching about scientific concepts.
I have been involved in developing teaching about aspects of the nature of science; preparing diagnostic assessment tools to help teachers identify students' alternative conceptions (misconceptions); and exploring the use of scaffolding in classrooms.
Read about Diagnostic assessment
Read about Alternative conceptions
Read about Scaffolding learning
What is teaching? And what is learning?
We all know what learning is, and what teaching is…but defining may not be so easy.
One definition of teaching is:
"teaching is seen as activity intended to lead to learning (usually in others), such as the actions of a teacher that are intended to bring about learning in his or her students…
effective teaching should be judged in terms of activity that facilitates the intended learning"
Taber, 2018: 2-3
So, in this definition there has to be an intention to teach for it to count as teaching (which is not to suggest learning cannot happen without intent, but in education we are largely focused on learning in relation to teaching).
But what is learning?
"Learning is considered to be a change in the behavioural repertoire, that is a change in the potential for behaviour"
Taber, 2018: 3
Although 'potential for behaviour' is to be read broadly.
Read about Learning
Constructivist teaching
Constructivism is perspective on teaching and learning which acknowledges how meaningful learning is an active process of sense-making.
Read about Constructivism
Learning tends to be interpretive, incremental and iterative (Taber, 2014): students make sense of teaching in terms of their existing knowledge and experience; learning occurs incrementally in modest quanta; and existing knowledge channels student learning. That is, there are usually different ways material can be interpreted and understood, and students will interpret teaching in those ways that makes most sense in terms of their existing thinking.
Teaching is is about making the unfamiliar familiar: that is, it is the teacher's job to make material that was unfamiliar to learners become familiar – and that can involve the use of explanations, descriptions, artifacts, images, demonstrations, models, movies, role-playing, analogies, metaphors, similies, and so forth.
There are many teaching approaches and types of learning activity that can be adopted in constructivist teaching, including concept mapping, D.A.R.T.s (directed activities related to text), discussion work, enquiry-based learning, flipped learning, groupwork, jigsaw learning, peer tutoring, project-based learning, and so on.
Read about Constructivist pedagogy
Representing knowledge in the curriculum and through teaching
I am also interested in the processes by which scientific knowledge is represented (and simplified, and sometimes, inevitably, distorted) in curricular models, teaching models, and in the processes of classroom teaching…
"It is argued that although target knowledge that is set out as the focus of teaching and learning cannot be identical to disciplinary knowledge, the English National Curriculum offers a representation of chemistry which distorts and confuses canonical ideas."
Taber, 2020
Read about the science curriculum
Read about curricular models
Read about teaching about the nature of science
Read about STEM education
Teaching is not the only source of learning
Teaching is action that is intended to facilitate learning – but learning does not require explicit teaching. Learners can learn some things directly form experience, and they can also learn from informal sources, such as the way science is represented in media – such as new reports or entertainments such as television dramas and films (movies).
Read about Science in public discourse and the media
Teaching can also be undertaken indirectly through the design of learning resources such as textbooks.
Read about Textbooks
Sources cited:
- Taber, K. S. (2014). Student Thinking and Learning in Science: Perspectives on the Nature and Development of Learners' Ideas. New York: Routledge.
- Taber, K. S. (2018). Scaffolding learning: principles for effective teaching and the design of classroom resources. In M. Abend (Ed.), Effective Teaching and Learning: Perspectives, strategies and implementation (pp. 1-43). New York: Nova Science Publishers.
- Taber, K. S. (2020). Conceptual confusion in the chemistry curriculum: exemplifying the problematic nature of representing chemical concepts as target knowledge. Foundations of Chemistry, 22:309-334. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10698-019-09346-3 [Open Access]
