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What makes an exemplary teacher of science?

The teachers perspective


Helen Wilson and Jenny Mant
ABSTRACT Questionnaire responses from 5044 year 8 (age 12 years) pupils in Oxfordshire state schools were used to identify exemplary science teachers. These teachers met for a one-day forum to explore their perspectives on exemplary teaching. The key characteristics of exemplary practice to emerge related to teacher attitudes and beliefs, relationships between teacher and pupil, pupils as active learners and well-planned contextualised lessons featuring discussion, practical work and limited, focused recording. The teachers perspectives are compared with those of their pupils and with existing literature. The role of explanation in science lessons emerges as warranting further in-depth study.

What is exemplary science teaching? How do exemplary teachers perceive their practice? What do they consider is important and what are the values and attitudes that underpin their teaching? As reported in our earlier article (Wilson and Mant, 2011), year 8 (age 12 years) pupils responses to a questionnaire were used to identify exemplary science teachers. These were teachers whose pupils were significantly more engaged and motivated by their science lessons than the majority of year 8 pupils. The previous article analysed the pupils perceptions of their science lessons. In this article we focus on the teachers perceptions. We explore these exemplary teachers views on their own practice and compare these both with the pupils views and with the existing literature. Previous work on exemplary science teaching has sought to identify characteristics both of exemplary science teachers and of their lessons (see, for example, Tobin and Fraser, 1990; Beeth and Hewson, 1999; Alsop, Bencze and Pedretti, 2005). Tobin and Frasers work took the form of case studies of Australian science teachers nominated by fellow professionals and was based on qualitative classroom observations. They made four assertions about exemplary science teachers as follows. Exemplary science teachers use strategies that:
l manage and facilitate student engagement; l increase student understanding of science;

l encourage students to participate in learning

activities; l maintain a favourable learning environment. Berliner (2004) described both a five-stage model for teacher development from novice to expert and a list of tested characteristics of the expert teacher. This work emerged from the field of cognitive psychology and is generic rather than science-teacher specific. The expert teacher characteristics were tested on a sample of US teachers, not specifically science teachers, who had taken a national test for certification as an expert teacher. The term PCK (pedagogical content knowledge) is prominent in the literature on teacher development and accomplishments. Shulman (1986) identified seven knowledge bases for teaching, one of which he termed PCK, which is, in essence, the knowledge needed by teachers for them to be able to transform their personal subject knowledge and make it accessible to their pupils. Shulman (1986: 9) describes PCK as follows: Within this category of pedagogical content knowledge I include, for the most regularly taught topics in ones subject area, the most useful forms of representation of those ideas, the most powerful analogies, illustrations, examples, explanations, and demonstrations in a word, the ways of representing and formulating the subject that make it comprehensible to others.
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What makes an exemplary teacher of science? The teachers perspective

Wilson and Mant

Methodology
Exemplary science teachers were identified from the responses to a questionnaire survey of 5044 year 8 pupils in 32 Oxfordshire state schools (Wilson and Mant, 2011). Initially, three statements from the questionnaire were used to identify classes where the pupils were particularly positive and enthusiastic:
l Science is fun; l I look forward to science lessons; l Science lessons are interesting.

Results
Five main agreed categories emerged from the activity: 1 2 3 4 5 teacher attitude and beliefs; relationships teacher to pupil; pupils as active learners; planning; types of activities and strategies.

It was decided to focus on classes where the total of the agree and strongly agree responses to each of the three statements was more than 50% of the pupils. These were classes where the pupils were particularly positive about their science lessons. The total cohort was made up of 230 classes, and 11 classes were identified with responses as defined above. The teachers from six of these classes were able to attend a one-day forum to explore their perspectives on their teaching and these are the teachers we refer to as the exemplary teachers in this article. The aim was to provide an opportunity for their views and attitudes to be elicited, discussed and analysed. The teachers were informed that they had been selected because the questionnaire responses indicated that their pupils were significantly more motivated and engaged in their science lessons than the majority of pupils and the aim was to discover some of the reasons for this. Initially the six teachers, individually and without consultation, thought about the key strategies and approaches they felt they used in their lessons. They listed the strategies so that each strategy was recorded on an individual self-adhesive Post-it note. These Post-it notes were then pooled and discussed as a group. A simple grounded theory approach (Cohen, Manion and Morrison, 2000: 150) was used, in that themes or broad categories emerged from the data and were agreed upon by the teachers themselves. The data were later further analysed for sub-categories within each of these main categories. The sub-categories that emerged were ranked by how frequently comments from the individual brainstorming activity fitted into each sub-category. The results below thus reflect the exemplary teachers perceptions of their own practice.

Each category is described below, together with the emerging sub-categories, and they are illustrated with a selection of quotations from the one-day forum.
1 Teacher attitude and beliefs

This category contained the highest number of Post-it notes from the teachers. They all agreed that teachers attitudes to their pupils and beliefs about their teaching are fundamental and underpin everything else. Within this category, three sub-categories stood out in the following order of frequency, with the most frequent at the top:
l The exemplary teachers were interested in

their pupils as people and they valued them.

I listen to them and am interested in them as people.


l The teachers were very enthusiastic about

science.

I try to share my inspiration and wonder and try to get them to feel the same.
l They believed in using humour within their

lessons.

Have a laugh! Smile a lot.


2 Relationships teacher to pupil

This was the next most populated category. It was clear from the discussions during the forum that everyone felt that the nature of the relationship between teacher and pupils is crucial and develops from the teachers attitudes and beliefs. Three sub-categories were evident:
l They communicated their interest in their pupils.

Greet them and ask them if they are OK.


l They were firm but fair and set clear boundaries. l They placed a high value on praise and

encouragement.

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Wilson and Mant

What makes an exemplary teacher of science? The teachers perspective carefully divided up and varied in content. Able pupils were considered and challenged: Extension work that is challenging, not just extra.
5 Types of activities and strategies
l Discussion was actively encouraged in lessons. l Practical work. l Focused recording writing was limited and

Use a vast amount of praise send letters home/ invite head into a lesson and show off their work. The exemplary teachers thus described fair and firm relationships based on mutual respect and consideration. Concentrate on understanding, rather than they havent got a pen.
3 Pupils as active learners

Three key features were present in this category and they were as follows, in order of frequency of citation, with the most frequent at the top:
l Assessment for Learning strategies. l The teachers were prepared to digress from the

not the main feature of a lesson.

lesson plans. l Pupil choice was encouraged (autonomy).

The teachers stressed the need to focus on talk and discussion and it was recognised that good discussion needs to be well planned. Numerous suggestions were made to develop discussion, including:
l pair and small-group work to build confidence

A strong feature of the exemplary teachers approach was to encourage their pupils to take ownership of and responsibility for their own learning and hence to become active learners (Black and Harrison, 2004). They used many formative assessment techniques such as selfand peer assessment of work using class-agreed criteria, and traffic lighting in which pupils use red, orange and green cards to indicate their level of understanding. They were also prepared to follow the pupils interests when appropriate and to deviate from their lesson plans or, as one teacher expressed it, be a bit unpredictable. They also encouraged pupil choice.
4 Planning

and thinking time; l debates to explain a point of view; l role plays; l visualisation; l what if? big questions; l pupils writing questions for each other.

This resonated with the data from the pupils questionnaires, showing that the pupils themselves were aware that discussion played a major part in their lessons. I reduce my teacher talk time they talk. Practical work was another feature of the teachers planning and the pupil questionnaires demonstrated clearly the motivational effect of enabling the pupils to be hands-on with experiments. Suggestions were also made for limiting the writing in lessons, so that it was well focused on the lesson objectives and did not take up too much time. Minimise writing concentrate on talking. Other types of strategies were mentioned, such as quizzes, displays of the pupils work and encouraging the pupils to feel like scientists. In summary, the exemplary teachers were enthusiastic about their subject, were interested in the pupils as people, and communicated this to them, using praise as positive reinforcement. They were firm but fair, setting clear boundaries. They were prepared to digress from the lesson plan to follow pupils interests and encouraged pupil choice where possible. They planned lessons that included Assessment for Learning
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It was clear that the exemplary teachers placed significant emphasis on thorough and meticulous planning of lessons, although they were also happy to deviate from those plans when appropriate, as mentioned above. A number of key principles emerged:
l The contextualisation of science and its

relevance to everyday life. l Lessons were divided into chunks and the activities varied. l The more able were challenged. The data from the project pupils questionnaires showed that they felt that the science they learnt in school is relevant to everyday life and it emerged from the teachers that they were overtly planning for this to be the case. The lessons were also

What makes an exemplary teacher of science? The teachers perspective strategies and encouraged the pupils to take responsibility for their own learning. The teachers contextualised the science, making it relevant to the pupils lives, and divided lessons into chunks, with a variety of activities. They gave time for discussion of the scientific ideas and limited the amount of writing in lessons. Practical work was integral and they challenged the more able pupils.
The teachers perspective compared with the pupils perspective

Wilson and Mant

Berliner (2004), in his study of the accomplishments of expert teachers, identified the following as characteristics of their practice:
l better use of knowledge; l extensive pedagogical content knowledge,

The common factors that emerged as being key factors within interesting and engaging science lessons, from both the pupils views (see Wilson and Mant, 2011) and the teachers views, were:
l l l l

discussion; contextualisation; practical; thinking.

However, interestingly, while the pupils of the exemplary teachers thought highly of their teachers ability to explain science clearly, the teachers themselves did not mention this specifically in their forum. It may be that they did not consider this because it is such an intuitive skill for them. It could also be that for them explanation of the science underpinned their planning and their choice of activities and strategies. It could be interpreted as evidence of them displaying the arational behaviour of Berliners expert teachers. He describes this as follows: [Experts] are acting effortlessly, fluidly and in a sense this is arational because it is not easily described as deductive or analytic behaviour. Experts have both an intuitive grasp of the situation and seem to sense in non-analytic and non-deliberate ways the appropriate response to be made. (Berliner, 2004: 207)

including deep representations of subject matter knowledge; l better problem-solving strategies; l better adaptation and modification of goals for diverse learners and better skills for improvisation; l better decision-making; l more challenging objectives; l better classroom climate; l better perception of classroom events and better ability to reads the cues from students; l greater sensitivity to context; l better monitoring of learning and providing feedback to students; l more frequent testing of hypotheses; l greater respect for students; l display of more passion for teaching. Our findings are generally in agreement with this list, except that, interestingly, none of the teachers used the term PCK. However, it was evident from the forum discussions that many aspects of PCK were deeply embedded in all of their teaching. While they did not explicitly discuss the extent of their own subject knowledge, they each had an extensive repertoire of stories, metaphors, analogies and models that they used to transform their scientific knowledge and make it accessible to their pupils. They thought hard about the needs of individual pupils and adapted their teaching accordingly. As has been said, Berliners work is generic and not science specific. It is notable that the findings from the exemplary teachers perspectives on their practice are also mostly generic. The only sub-categories above that are science specific are:
l The teachers were very enthusiastic about

Discussion
From the perspective of these exemplary teachers, the most important conditions for exemplary practice concerned attitudes, beliefs and relationships. They had positive attitudes towards their pupils, scientific ideas and their teaching. They believed in their pupils, wanted them to learn and put considerable effort and thought into facilitating that.
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science. l Practical work. l The contextualisation of science and its relevance to everyday life.

Similarly, in the summary list of Tobin and Frasers findings (1990) cited earlier, only one point is overtly subject specific: increase student understanding of science. Considering

Wilson and Mant

What makes an exemplary teacher of science? The teachers perspective Obviously, these features are likely to be implicit within some of his characteristics but they were not highlighted as such. There is clear resonance here with the findings from our previous research that highlighted the value of increased time spent in discussion of scientific ideas, an increased emphasis on the encouragement of higher order thinking, more practical work and investigations, and more focused and purposeful recording by pupils and less writing (Mant, Wilson and Coates, 2007). As described above, another interesting feature of our findings is that the pupils identified the ability to explain clearly as a core element within exemplary teaching and yet the teachers themselves did not explicitly mention this key skill. If , as we have argued, many aspects of explaining have become an intuitive and in some ways unconscious skill for these exemplary teachers then the important questions arise as to how the skill is acquired, and how trainee and novice teachers can be helped to develop it. This crucial area of explanation in science teaching does, we feel, merit further in-depth analysis and exploration.

how different science as a discipline is from, say, history or English literature, it is interesting that so many of the characteristics of exemplary science teachers are shared with teachers of other subjects. In fact, if enthusiasm about science above were replaced by enthusiasm about subject and increase student understanding of science were replaced by increase student understanding of subject, then little that is distinctive remains. Practical work in science is surely distinctive and the pupils responses showed clearly that this was highly instrumental in their engagement, as was the contextualisation of the subject. We would argue that the big ideas of science are also distinctive and that encouraging engagement with these through talk and discussion is vital. It is therefore notable that the following categories from this study are not specifically included in Berliners list:
l l l l

a focus on talk and discussion; pupil choice/autonomy; practical work; focused recording.

References Alsop, S., Bencze, L. and Pedretti, E. (2005) Analysing Exemplary Science Teaching. Buckingham: Open University Press. Beeth, M. and Hewson, P. (1999) Learning goals in an exemplary science teachers practice: cognitive and social factors in teaching for conceptual change. Science and Education, 83(6), 738760. Berliner, D. (2004) Describing the behaviour and documenting the accomplishments of expert teachers, Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 24, 200212. Black, P. and Harrison, C. (2004) Science Inside the Black Box. London: GL Assessment. Cohen. P., Manion, L. and Morrison, K. (2000) Research Methods in Education. London: Routledge Falmer. Mant, J., Wilson, H. and Coates, D. (2007) The effect of increasing conceptual challenge in primary science lessons on pupils achievement and engagement. International Journal of Science Education, 29(14), 17071719. Shulman, L. (1986) Those who understand: knowledge growth in teaching Educational Researcher, 15(2), 414. Tobin, K. and Fraser, B. (1990) What does it mean to be an exemplary science teacher? Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 27(1), 325. Wilson, H. and Mant, J. (2011) What makes an exemplary teacher of science? The pupils perspective. School Science Review, 93(342), 121125.

Helen Wilson is a senior lecturer in science education at Oxford Brookes University. Jenny Mant is an honorary research fellow at Oxford University. Emails: h.wilson@brookes.ac.uk; jenny.mant@education.ox.ac.uk

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