Teachers’ SSI Professional Development in a Reflection-Based In-service Program

Teachers’ professional development (PD) of teaching SSI has gained importance because the SSI-based interventions have demonstrated fruitful benefits for students’ higher order thinking and the potential to promote connections between school science and real life. The contradictory and multiple perspectives in the SSI context presents many pedagogical challenges for teachers while teaching students how to discuss and deal with these issues in the classroom. Thus, we developed a PD program and used a systematic measurement to explore the teachers’ discourse when they engaged in this experience. The case study invited 12 in-service teachers to participate; they were separated into three groups based on the teachers’ backgrounds. All teachers’ discourse in the group was collected and analyzed based on epistemic frame theory. The results indicated that (a) teachers’ epistemic frames related to knowledge and skills were the most common forms of discourse and (b) engaging teachers in reflective practice was helpful for promoting their tacit discourse, including epistemology, and identity discourse. These findings suggest that an effective PD program needs to engage teachers in reflective practice in a long-term program and that interacting with teachers from diverse fields might be helpful for promoting their multidisciplinary perspective for teaching SSI.