Teacher Facilitation of Elementary Science Discourse after a Professional Development Initiative

This article reports on changes in science discourse practices of four teachers who participated in an extended professional development (PD) program. Teachers were selected for their different patterns of improvement in the quality of their classroom discourse during their participation in the program. Analyses of their practices to support student discourse focused on “talk structures” and “teacher talk moves,” identified through fine-grained coding of these lesson features in classroom videos. All teachers increased their use of interactive talk structures and the cognitive demand of the talk moves they used while facilitating discussion. At the same time, there was considerable diversity in their improvements. Analyses of interviews and surveys indicate that they adopted pedagogical tools introduced in the PD program. We discuss the relationship between changes in their practice and features of the PD and suggest implications for PD and research.