Jessie Nixon

As science classrooms increasingly adopt computational tools to support inquiry-based learning, teachers must develop new instructional strategies to help students navigate the technical challenges that invariably arise, particularly debugging programmable sensors. This paper presents four case studies of secondary science teachers as they developed their “debugging pedagogies”—a repertoire of strategies to support students as they debugged a programmable sensor technology—through participation in two year-long professional learning cycles. Using the lens of the Interconnected Model of Teacher Professional Growth, we analyze shifts across personal, practical, consequential, and external domains of teacher learning. Data sources include videos of teachers’ workshops activities and classroom enactments, interviews, and surveys. Analyses examine how teachers’ debugging pedagogies evolved through cycles of collaborative learning, reflection, and classroom enactments. While all teachers demonstrated increased confidence and responsiveness in supporting students’ debugging efforts, contextual factors, such as curriculum constraints and class size, shaped how their beliefs about how much to let students struggle during debugging translated into classroom practice. This work contributes to the field of science education by extending a model for designing professional learning to support both technical skill development and pedagogical growth in computationally rich classrooms.

Objectives . Physical computing systems are increasingly being integrated into secondary school science and STEM instruction, yet little is known about how teachers, especially those with little background and experience in computing, help students during the inevitable debugging moments that arise. In this article, we describe a framework, comprising two dimensions, for characterizing how teachers support students as they debug a physical computing system called the Data Sensor Hub (DASH). The DASH enables students to program sensors to measure, analyze, and visualize data as they engage in science inquiry activities. Participants . Five secondary school teachers implemented an inquiry-oriented instructional unit designed to introduce students to working with the DASH as a tool for scientific inquiry. Study Method . Findings drew on video analysis of the teachers’ classroom implementations of the unit. A review of the data corpus led to the selection of 23 moments where the teachers supported an individual or small groups of students engaged in debugging. These moments were analyzed using a grounded perspective based on Interaction Analysis to characterize the teachers’ varied interactional approaches. Findings . Our analysis revealed how teachers’ moves during debugging moments fell along two dimensions. The first dimension characterizes teachers’ positioning during the debugging interactions, ranging from a positioning for teacher understanding to a positioning for student understanding of the bug. The second dimension characterizes the inquiry orientation of the teachers’ questions and guidance, ranging from focusing on the debugging process to focusing on the product—or fixing the bug. Further, teachers’ moves often fell along different points on these dimensions given nuances in the instructional context. Conclusions . The framework offers a first step toward characterizing teachers’ debugging pedagogy as they support students during debugging moments. It also calls attention to how teachers do not necessarily need to be programming experts to effectively help students learn independent and generalizable debugging strategies. Further, it illustrates the variety of expertise that teachers can bring to debugging moments to support students learning to debug. Finally, the framework provides implications for the design of professional learning and supports for teachers as they increasingly are asked to support students in computing—and debugging—activities across a range of disciplines.

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