Analysis of Practice and Teacher PCK: Inferences from Professional Development Research

Abstract

In this chapter, we describe an approach to professional development grounded in a model of PCK that centers around a teacher’s knowledge of how to elicit and respond to student thinking, to engage students in the practices of sci- ence, and to develop coherent and effective learning experiences. This approach has been shown to be effective in increasing PCK in both in-service professional development and pre-service teacher education contexts and has resulted in increased student achievement when compared to more traditional approaches. Current and future directions for this work include examining the pathways between teacher professional knowledge and student learning, further develop- ment of our approach to measuring PCK using automated analysis of teacher writ- ing, and exploring how to effectively scale up this somewhat resource-intensive approach to teacher learning.