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One of the main aspects of professional vision is highlighting. Highlighting identifies what are the aspects of IBSE activities that PTs think are important. As mentioned

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earlier, Professional Vision is usually examined in the context of novice learners examining professionals carrying out activities in the field. In this study, PTs were instead engaged in IBSE practices, and then highlighted the aspects of these activities and practices that they felt were important.

After the claims about PTs’ views of IBSE were generated, it was found that they characterised teaching in three broad ways: rote learning, guided inquiry and open inquiry. By rote learning, they meant that either students read from a book, or listen to a teacher reading. They also consider taking notes from slides etc. as a version of this. A level ‘above’ this type of teaching is what they classify as ‘guided inquiry’. PTs use this as a broad term, but it involves students being engaged in some sort of activity, which is usually practical. Lastly, PTs see open inquiry as a step above this again.

PTs also identified questioning during practicals as something that was important. However, they raise concerns that questions must not be too hard. In week four, one group discusses an idea of scaffolding. In order for students to be able to answer questions, steps must be “just right”. They label this as “hardness”, describing that “questions would be too hard for students to answer and should be made more clear so they will not get confused” [Group D Week 4]. Throughout the module, PTs highlighted the level of guidance, sequencing of questions and correctness as criteria for deciding on the purpose of IBSE activities. Figure 3.1 below shows a graphical representation of this.

71 Figure 3.1 Summary of the views of PTs

Along with looking at what aspects of IBSE activities that PTs highlight as important, key to the design experiment is trying to understand why they feel that these are important, or in the language of professional vision, coding. During the third week of workshops, PTs viewed scientific representations as something that students should learn as fact. They did not discuss how it could be valuable to allow students to initially form their own representations. One concern is that activities should not leave students confused. When highlighting the purposes of IBSE activities, PTs continually talked about hardness and confusion. They also viewed the purpose of practical activities as being able to remember a procedure and materials, followed by remembering the ‘correct’ outcome of the experiment. PTs feel that eliciting students’ ideas is only a strategy to hear any misconceptions that students may have regarding a particular topic, so that they can then correct them. They don’t see this as a practice where students are creating initial models of what is being studied (Windschitl, 2004).

In Week 5, PTs also identified with the theme of correctness. In the critiques for the Electric Conduction workshop, PTs questioned if the correct answer (what they call theory) should be given to students before or after they have completed an activity. One of the concerns is that allowing students to perform an experiment without knowing

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correct terms could lead to students to leave with incorrect ideas, which will then have to be corrected.

It is clear that in these early stages of developing an understanding of IBSE, the PTs’ notions were still quite plastic. It is impossible to say to what extent the timeline of the changes in their ideas are influenced by our sequencing of the activities. It is therefore safest to consider the difference between the start and end points of these five

workshops.

One of the aims of this cycle was to use PTs’ highlighting and coding practices to inform any future design cycles. One conclusion is that it is clear that both the Junior and Leaving Certificate examinations still strongly influence PTs’ practice. This is evident in their tendency to focus on facts and procedures. As discussed in Chapter 1, both the Junior and Leaving Certificate have a huge pace in Irish school culture. The Apprenticeship of Observation PTs have been exposed to therefore will have been one where these exams have had prominence.

For future cycles of the workshops and indeed the module, this is something that would have to be considered. While it was felt that the overall structure of the workshops was useful, and did bring up several useful discussions with PTs, it would be useful to bring in some new aspects that might help to bring the focus of PTs away from facts and procedures. Each weekly workshop in the present cycle was designed to engage PTs in IBSE activities.

While the weekly activities were designed to be used or adapted for use in Junior Cycle classrooms, PTs were not actually seeing IBSE being used in the classroom. So PTs may have left the workshops thinking that, since they have not “really” been taught in a way like this, IBSE would not be practical to use while in the classroom. Chapter 3 reports on PTs’ highlighting and coding practices of an IBSE activity that actually took

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place in the classroom. This was done through PTs engaging in video analysis of an IBSE activity taking place.

PTs’ focus on content also raised questions about how they might critique IBSE activities that focus on content that they are not familiar with. Therefore this is something that was also considered including in future design cycles.