Using Sense-Making Moments to Understand How Elementary Teachers’ Interactions Expand, Maintain, or Shut Down Sense-making in Science

Abstract Eliciting, noticing, and responding to students’ sense-making is important for advancing students’ understanding and fostering meaningful participation in science. By sense-making, we mean wrestling with ideas, language, experiences, and perspectives in a community to figure out how and why the world works. In the bustle of an elementary classroom, noticing and productively responding to the seemingly disorderly processes of sense-making presents challenges for teachers. Further, sense-making interactions are especially consequential for racially, linguistically and culturally minoritized youth whose ways of knowing are more expansive than the narrow conceptions of science present in schools. One core challenge for supporting sense-making in classrooms has been understanding the nature of these complex, dynamic, and multi-faceted interactions. To address this challenge, we analyzed videos of classroom sense-making interactions along with teachers’ reflections about those interactions to focus on sense-making moments or the composite set of moments called episodes. Doing so enabled us to understand pedagogical moves, responses and resources that were leveraged in sense-making interactions as well as how teachers interpreted those moments. It also enabled us to determine characteristics of those interactions that expanded, maintained, or shut down opportunities for sense-making. We illustrate these findings using three cases chosen from a larger multiple studies research project with early career and experienced elementary teachers. These three nuanced cases deepen our collective understanding of complex sense-making interactions in elementary classrooms by offering alternative analysis of sense-making interactions and their consequences on future sense-making. For example, while one sense-making episode initially appeared chaotic, pedagogical moves to incorporate emergent ideas into the science narrative and challenging and connecting ideas moved toward expanding opportunities for sense-making. Unpacking sense-making moments is critical for understanding the nature and consequences of sense-making moments as well as how to better support teachers in providing sense-making opportunities for all students in science.