ABSTRACT
The ESTELL project is organized around making the following pedagogical considerations available to science methods instructors, pre-service teachers, and the master teachers that supervise them:
• Facilitating Collaborative Inquiry • Promoting Science Talk • Literacy in Science
• Scaffolding and Development of Language in Science • Contextualizing Science Activity • Promoting Scientific/Complex Thinking
Teacher and students producing together (Facilitating Collaborative Inquiry) refers to activity where the teacher facilitates learning through purposeful interaction with students and facilitates student-student interaction. The expertise in science (Authority) is shared with students and students are encouraged to see their science activities as contributions to the scientific field. Promoting Science Talk refers to opportunities that the teacher structures during a science lesson where he/she can directly model academic discourse patterns and evaluate students’ comprehension of the language needed to practice the nature of science. Teachers engage students in dialogue by initiating conversation, eliciting student discussions in ways germane to the scientific enterprise (e.g., evidence-based explanations). Literacy in Science looks to make the literacy involved in doing science more explicit. Teachers provide explicit instruction in the reading and writing tasks as well as the vocabulary of focus in science lessons. Scaffolding and Development of Language in Science addresses the additional considerations a teacher can take to make abstract science concepts more concrete for ELLs by providing visual representations, multimodal experiences, and modulating the teacher’s talk. Connecting classroom activities and learning to students’ home and/or community experiences is a critical process allowing for students to make sense of emerging and familiar knowledge (Contextualizing Science Activity). In this respect, contextualized science teaching refers to situating everyday, familiar knowledge, in the science learning goals of pre-service teachers’ science lessons. Promoting Scientific Thinking refers to the practice of guiding elementary grade students’ understanding of the inquiry process.
