A Tool for Visualizing and Inquiring into Whole-Class Sensemaking Discussions
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A Tool for Visualizing and Inquiring into Whole-Class Sensemaking Discussions Carolyn Colley 1
& Mark Windschitl
2
Accepted: 10 September 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
In science classrooms, the epistemic practices of explanation building and argumentation often extend over multiple episodes of talk during a single lesson or across several lessons. Analyzing this kind of discourse requires a way to identify patterns that emerge over time to better understand student participation and how teachers support students’ disciplinary work. In this paper, we share the development of a unique graphic representation of classroom talk which we call barcodes. These barcodes assisted our analysis of when and how, over multiple points in a school year, three elementary science teachers facilitated students’ science sensemaking during whole-class discussions in ways that ended up promoting, sustaining, or constraining students’ collective development of ideas. Barcodes allowed us to see that each teacher regularly engaged students in rigorous whole-class talk over a school year, yet each classroom had distinct patterns of teacher involvement and activity sequences that preceded or co-occurred with these conversations. Paired with transcripts, barcodes illuminated a relationship between teacher responsiveness to specific student ideas and higher discursive rigor. Finally, iterative cross-referencing between barcodes and transcripts sparked further inquiries into supportive conditions for talk that were not as apparent using transcripts alone. In this way, the barcode functioned both as an analytical tool and a final visualization of discourse events in a series of lessons from grades 5 and 6 science classrooms. Keywords Visualizing classroom talk . Talk moves . Scaffolding . Discursive rigor
* Carolyn Colley [email protected] Mark Windschitl [email protected]
1
Renton Public Schools, Renton, WA, USA
2
University of Washington, Seattle, Seattle, WA, USA
Research in Science Education
Introduction Current research-based frameworks for equitable and effective science teaching promote whole-class dialog as a way for students to critique and build on one another’s ideas, argue about evidence, and collaboratively construct explanations for natural phenomena (Mercer 1996; Mortimer and Scott 2003; Resnick et al. 2010). Yet these kinds of public sensemaking are rare in science classrooms (Weiss et al. 2003; Osborne and Dillon 2008), in part because teachers and students are accustomed to recitation-style instruction where students are expected to reproduce knowledge by giving correct answers (Alexander 2015). More authentic discussions require teachers to be responsive to student thinking both in-the-moment and across lessons, signaling to learners that co-developing science explanations is worthy of sustained inquiry while socializing them into disciplinary-specific and dialogic ways of using language (Gee 2008; Mehan and Cazden 2015; Mercer 2010). Importantly, this knowledgebuilding unfolds across varied timesc
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