UC Santa Barbara

Students designated as English learners (ELs) are the fastest growing group of students in K-12 public schools across the United States. As such, it is important for teacher education programs across the country to support their preservice teachers in attending to the academic and linguistic needs of ELs in order to foster learning opportunities in the classroom. Moreover, given the push for rigorous and equitable science instruction, preservice science teachers of ELs must also learn how to make cognitively demanding work accessible and understandable so that all students can benefit.

In this qualitative study, I investigated the lesson series of 20 preservice science teachers from four research universities by qualitatively analyzing their edTPA portfolios. These 20 preservice science teachers represented 37% of all preservice science teachers enrolled in these four programs across the two years of this study. Moreover, I separated my preservice teacher participants into two distinct groups: participants who did not have any EL students when completing their second semester takeover and participants who had at least one EL student in their classrooms at that time. For participants in the EL group, their EL students spoke a variety of home languages and ranged in English proficiency from emerging, to expanding, to bridging (beginning, intermediate, advanced). Further, I then narrowed down my two group samples to only include the participants with the top five and bottom five edTPA scores within each of the two groups. As a result, my final research sample included 20 preservice science teachers, including 10 participants from the EL group and 10 from the non-EL group

Using a lens of Task Analysis Guide in Science (TAGS), I tracked the NGSS science and engineering practices and science content included in tasks so as to evaluate both the kind and level of student reasoning and sensemaking required. To do so, I examined if and how preservice secondary science teachers (PSTs) contributed to ways to support ELs in both the content and language of science as well as provided opportunities to integrate complex science content and practices in their instruction. More specifically, I analyzed preservice secondary science teachers’ integration of science practices with content and implementation of cognitively demanding tasks as well as whether or not their teaching varied by those preservice teachers who had ELs in their classroom and those who did not. I also examined preservice secondary science teachers’ support of academic language demands, and whether or not those types of support differed between those PSTs who taught ELs and those who did not.

One of the major findings was that the PSTs’ instructional task content-practice integration and use of cognitively demanding work were clearly related to how successful they were during their performance assessment, as specified by their total edTPA scores. In fact, those 10 participants who scored high on the edTPA (both PSTs with ELs and PSTs without ELs) were placed in the TAGS Quadrant I: Their instruction showed a high level of integration between science content and practices, and a high level of cognitive demand. In contrast, those 10 participants who had the bottom edTPA scores in each group (both PSTs with ELs and PSTs without ELs) were placed in the TAGS Quadrant III: They were neither able to successfully integrate the subject content and NGSS practices nor high cognitively demand during instructional tasks.

A second major finding was in terms of the number and types of academic language supports for ELs identified across PSTs. Overall, I found that participants described types of language support at the discursive level the most often and supports at the syntactic level the least often, with discussion of supports at the lexical level falling in between. In addition, those participants who did not teach ELs were still able to implement many of the same types of support across all three levels when compared to those PSTs with ELs. However, when compared to participants in Quadrant I, Quadrant III participants exhibited a greater variation in terms of supports across both groups (PSTs with ELs and those without ELs) and implemented fewer number of supports in general.

In sum, my findings indicate that some preservice secondary science teachers learned to recognize and appreciate their role in promoting reform-based science classrooms that support all students, especially ELs, better than others. Some PSTs were also able to develop a deeper understanding about academic language at the lexical, syntactic, and discursive levels than others. As such, this study suggests that the four teacher education programs were partially effective in supporting PSTs in developing effective instruction for ELs and implementing ambitious teaching practices aligned with the NGSS framework and cognitively demanding tasks. I conclude by providing recommendations for teacher education programs to better prepare reform-minded secondary science teachers capable of teaching all students, especially English learners.