Abstract
This chapter explores knowledge-building practice within a teacher community, emphasizing teachers’ continual improvement of practice while they foster continual improvement of students’ ideas. Knowledge-building practice places students’ ideas at the center of the classroom enterprise, focusing on getting students to take responsibility to improve ideas. Building on various models of teacher thinking and development, a problem space model is developed to guide the investigation and to provide a theoretically and empirically based description of shifts teachers undergo as they gain skill in knowledge-building pedagogy. The model examines the following five main problem spaces: (1) curriculum/standards, (2) social interaction, (3) student capability, (4) classroom structures and constraints, and (5) technology. This research study analyzes three sets of teacher meetings over a full school year, interspersed with excerpts of three teachers’ independent classroom practices (all three are participants of the teachers’ meeting). Results show that knowledge-building teachers construct and explore the same problem spaces as other teachers. What distinguishes them and places them on a different trajectory is the approach that brings ideas to the center in each problem space characterized by three embedded shifts: (a) surface to deep interpretation of problem and processing of information, (b) routine to adaptive approach to classroom activities and student engagement, and (c) procedure-based to principle-based reflective action.
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Notes
- 1.
Knowledge Forum® is the second generation of Computer-Supported Intentional Learning Environment (CSILE) (Scardamalia et al. 1989). It is an asynchronous discourse medium where students and teachers author or coauthor notes that include multimedia elements, ideas, models, problems, plans, and data. Users can create graphic views as workspaces to hold these notes. Knowledge Forum also provides supportive features such as build-on, annotations, reference links to one another’s notes, and rise above to allow users to organize and summarize the collective ideas.
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Teo, C.L. (2014). Conceptual Shifts Within Problem Spaces for Knowledge-Building Practice Within a Teacher Community. In: Tan, S., So, H., Yeo, J. (eds) Knowledge Creation in Education. Education Innovation Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-047-6_12
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