Slow to start, I felt this is going to be too boring, I was wrong. Thefirst two lessons getting
their ideas was not exciting, but actually it did hook the kids in....You couldn’t go wrong.
The student teachers could take this lesson and do well. It gave me the background
knowledge, broke it down into the children’s thinking, and gave you scope to move
sideways....After you (researcher observer) came in and observed my sifting lesson, I
really thought the kids had not really quite grasped it, which I was quite surprised about, so
I did another lesson, but with different substances as a whole class lesson. I linked it back to
noodles and rice, and suddenly I saw little light bulbs going on everywhere and“Oh, of
course!”I also used a steamer with holes and the kids recognized this. (Junior School
Teacher, Year 2, Focus group interview)To the research team and Principal of the school perhaps the most gratifying
outcomes of the project were the improved dispositions of teachers towards science
teaching and the positive responses of their students. It appears that both mastery
and social experiences (Bandura 1997 ) were sources of self-efficacy beliefs, as these
comments show:
T7. I would not consider myself a teacher of science or a good teacher of science or a
natural teacher of science so it [CoRe design] helped me engage with the material. It helped
me think more deeply about the material. I felt I actually learnt a lot myself which actually
improved me as well so with that, and with what the children brought as well, we just all
learned heaps, and the markers were there too which kept me on track.
T3: I’m not naturally predisposed to teach science; the way we planned it has given me
more confidence to do that...I knew the [resource]was there but I have more confidence to
source things from the [resource]and other places. In the past I have beenflailing around in
the dark about the scientific concepts...I have more confidence to go out and teach that, and
seeing the results from children, and the continuing conversations [with colleagues and
researchers], have shown me I’ve done something right. (Middle School Teachers, Focus
Group interview)
Principal: The teachers are saying they are confident in (1) that they have a plan to share
with the students so they know where they are going and how that links with what
everybody else is doing and (2) they know how they are linking enviro (environmental
science) and science now, it wasn’t clear before that, it felt too fragmented. And they have a
planning model–the CoRe design–so they are now confident they can talk to students
about‘this is the big idea that we are working on and this is how this impacts into the plan
and this is the process we are going to use’. They are quite clear that they now have a much
more focused way of talking to students about science education in the school. (Principal
interview)To provide more constructive feedback to individual teachers re their classroom
practice (and to bring greater reliability to research data) the researchers designed an
Observational Protocol to use during classroom observations. In conversations after
lessons, this protocol enabled the researchers to provide individual teachers with
more consistent and focused feedback on their classrooms actions and those of their
students that were pertinent to their PCK development for teaching inquiry-based
science. When collated, the data from completed observational protocols allowed
trends in teachers’PCK for science inquiry learning to be identified and fed back to
the teachers for discussion. This collated data provided key direction for the project
team when establishing the set of contextualised design principles for the rede-
velopment and implementation of school’s science education plan.
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