In the February 1996 JRST editorial, Pekarek, Krockover, and Shepardson despaired over the lack of teachers' application of research in informing their day-to-day practice. We agree that such a theory-practice (or research-practice) gap by science teachers deserves their concern. We would like the research community to know that some practitioners are listening. Researchers calling for greater participation in action research: please keep calling. You are being heard. Do not, however, look to the status quo to implement your cutting edge ideas. For those researchers out on your edge of theory, here is a response from some practitioners who are out on our edge of classroom teaching.
As a brief introduction, we are science teachers in a high school in London, Ontario, Canada. In our practice over the past few years, we have become increasingly involved with conceptual change (CC) pedagogy (e.g., Posner, Strike, Hewson, & Gertzhog, 1982;Wittrock, 1994) and a teacher-as-researcher ethos. We would like to report to the research community where advances in research have taken us, and where we would appreciate future research to be directed.
Our classroom is directed at student representations of phenomena. We have found several effective ways of teaching students to commit their notions to paper in pictures and words. We then use their pictures, plus discussion and confounding experiments, to generate cognitive conflict. As an interesting aside, we have found that the size of the picture matters: large diagrams are much more effective at promoting cognitive conflict than postage-stamp diagrams. The balance of our classroom research is devoted to clarifying age-appropriate unifying principles, and finding effective ways of representing those principles.
In addition, we have extended these ideas into our work with student teachers. We have developed a model of internship in which we encourage novice teachers to use CC pedagogy in dealing with students' naive ideas about science. At the same time, we use CC theory to disequilibrate student teachers' naive ideas about learning science.