Professed Vs. Enacted Beliefs About Responsive Science Teaching Three Cases From A Practice-Based Middle Level Teacher Certification Program

In this chapter, we report on middle level math and science preservice teachers taking practice-based courses in the semester preceding student teaching. These courses focus on responsive teaching an approach that emphasizes eliciting, attending, and responding to the substance of students' thinking. We describe our practice-based pedagogy and focus our research on three preservice teachers to explore how beliefs about science teaching and learning interact with developing responsive teaching practices. We develop a hypothesis that preservice teachers engage in practices of responsive teaching when they draw on beliefs about science teaching and learning as grounded in building on students' prior knowledge and experience. This hypothesis could be further explored by following these preservice teachers into their teaching career and by future large-scale studies.