BIO

I am currently a sophomore Ponte Vedra Beach. I am conducting research in education. I am planning on attending Physician's Assistant school after undergraduate school, and I plan on being a Pediatric PA.

Caring for Students as Thinkers: A Case Study

Abstract

The field of science teacher education research has a burgeoning imperative to understand and support more equitable science teaching such that all students not only learn science but do science in ways that are authentic to the discipline and support students to feel a sense of belonging in science classrooms (National Research Council, 2012). In this work, we seek to add to this literature by sharing an in-depth exploration of the interactional dynamics in the classroom of a public high school science teacher, Danny, during an AP Chemistry lesson on periodic trends in which his students are enthusiastically engaged in the doing of science to figure out how and why these trends exist. In an effort to explore how Danny supported and sustained his students’ outwardly emotional engagement in figuring out the phenomena, we became attuned to the ways in which Danny responded to his students with genuine care for their deep thinking. Here, we share pieces of this ongoing analysis to illustrate how we see evidence of this care in Danny’s responses to students and discuss potential implications for practice and future research.

Keywords: caring, belonging. science, classroom