teachers consider are the big ideas of the topic to be learned by students, and a
series of questions/prompts that reveal the reasoning and actions of these teachers as
they help students to develop understanding of the big ideas.
The teacher educator pointed out that not only did CoRe design have a proven
record for exposing the PCK of experienced science teachers, but it was also
proving effective in her experience for enhancing both pre- and in-service teachers’
capabilities in science teaching. She found CoRe design, when done collaboratively
and facilitated by an expert, helped address a significant cause of teachers’trepi-
dation about teaching science, that is, lack of deep and coherent understanding of
science content. This mastery of content for primary science can be achieved in
CoRe design via the initial focus on establishing key science ideas for a given topic
and the essential content students needed to learn for understanding of these ideas.
The pedagogical prompts in the body of the CoRe then help teachers to consider,
share and debate how best to scaffold students’learning of this core content. The
teacher educator also saw its potential for assisting teachers in‘bigger picture’
school-wide curriculum design if the intervention was introduced within a whole
school science curriculum redevelopment. The Principal recognised the potential of
the intervention and quickly accepted the opportunity to collaborate. Within a week
a plan was negotiated that involvedfive university researchers (including the tea-
cher educator as Principal Investigator) and all 25 teachers at the school. Together,
they worked as a team in a school-based research project featuring CoRe design.
54.6 Methodology
The university researchers knew from research that most successful teacher
development programmes take place inside school-based professional learning
communities (PLCs) and use collaborative models of inquiry involving cycles of
Table 54.1 Template for a content representation (CoRe), as developed by Loughran et al. ( 2006 )
Pedagogical questions/prompts Big idea 1 Big idea 2 Big idea 3
What you intend the students to learn about this idea
Why is it important for the students to know this?
What else you know about this idea (that you do not
intend students to know yet)
Difficulties connected with teaching this idea
Knowledge about student thinking which influences
teaching about this idea
Other factors that influence your teaching of this idea
Teaching procedures (and particular reasons for using
these to engage with this idea)
Ways of ascertaining student understanding or
confusion about the idea804 A. Hume