The meaning-making of science teachers participating in a school-based PD project

The meaning-making of four science teachers involved in collaboratively analyzing video and other artifacts from practice in local science classrooms in a school-based professional development project is examined through repeated interviews and represented as meaning-making maps. The research aim is to examine how these collaborative inquiries make sense to the teachers: what they identify as outcomes, how they make use of inputs and support in their classrooms and in collegial interactions and how their ideas about teaching and learning of science might play a role. An adapted version of the interconnected model of professional growth is used to analyze interview data and represent the teachers’ meaning-making: Their construction of understanding and interpretation of experiences. Findings are that all the four teachers use artifacts from the project in their interpretation regarding students learning of science in concrete situations. They refer to outcomes from sharing experiments with new tools and materials and refer to being encouraged to continue collaboration around science at the school. Beside this the teachers emphasize various outcomes apparently for each of them in areas where they feel supported in relation to tensions in their professional practice. For example a novice teacher, who before the project referred to students’ self-regulated hands-on activities as the most important part of good science teaching, but experienced problems with classroom management, feels inspired by video from the colleagues’ classrooms to focus also on structured minds-on activities. A teacher from primary science who before the project expressed that she was relative passive in the science team because she had no specialization in primary science and felt unsecure in relation to the physics content emphasizes outcomes from being supported in her first time teaching electrical circuits and from sharing this positive experience with the colleagues.