A Practitioner’s Insight on Grade 5 Pupils developing and improving theory in the topic of cells. Teo Chew Lee, National Institute of Education, chewlee.teo@nie.edu.sg; Ushanthini Arumugam, Jamay Loh Shwu Hwa, Andy Ng Ding Xuan, St. Hilda’s Primary School, ushanthini_arumugam@moe.edu.sg, lin-loh_shwu_hwa@moe.edu.sg, ng_ding_xuan@moe.edu.sg Abstract: Knowledge Building has been defined as "the production and continual improvement of ideas of value to a community, through means that enable the community to accomplish more than the sum of individual’s contribution" (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2014). The theoretical concept and research findings have been extremely forthcoming. The question remained that of “What do these abstract definitions of knowledge creation trajectories look like in a classroom?”. It has been talked about in educational research in the past decades, but the concept of the idea- centric classroom has remained elusive to many teachers. In this study, we describe an effort to clarify this 'elusive' practice by developing practice-based knowledge about the trajectories of knowledge-building activities and outcomes through a practitioner’s reflection and recount. The process of idea generation; theory improvement through pupils' scientific reasoning is described through the reflection of the practitioner. This practitioner has two years of KB experience embedded within six years of teaching experience. The discussion of this narration aims to provide insights into (i) teacher's curriculum knowledge to support the knowledge building practice; (ii) teacher's interpretation of the cognitive and social practices needed for pupils to improve theories. The paper also highlights the seized and missed opportunities of a principle- based approach to lesson design. Introduction Knowledge building pedagogy is a principle-based approach to learning that has a goal of co-creating “new” perspectives or understanding advanced knowledge beyond just the limit of an individual, it is a collective effort to explore and learn more about the topic. This case study describes a practitioner’s (second year of knowledge building work but with six years of teaching experience) recount and reflection of a series of 4 one-hour lessons Knowledge Building (KB) lesson she designed and enacted. These lessons spanned over three weeks. The teacher worked with 26 high-progress pupils in this particular class. She was keen to explore the possibilities of using Knowledge Forum (KF) to start a new topic on Cells with all the current constraints of time, curriculum and assessment demand. She started with a problem of understanding for her practice “I would like to find out how the KB approach in the classroom really impact pupils’ learning in Science?” Her focus was on getting pupils to improve their theories on “cells” to bring about deeper learning. A set of curriculum mapping (connections across facts, concepts, and theories in the topic of cells) was put together at the teachers’ weekly meeting to understand the teacher’s perspectives and her take on the content required in the curriculum document. The teacher’s reflection, lesson design and enactment were recorded. In this paper, we will discuss the areas of (i) content to be covered; (ii) activities designed; (iii) thinking scaffold adopted; (iv) point of interest or worthy ideas picked up by teachers, strategies to recognise patterns in pupils discussions to highlight misconceptions; (v) pupils’ outcomes; in each phase of her lessons (see Appendix A). All pupils’ discourses are recorded on Knowledge Forum. In this reflection, the teacher also systematically analysed the notes from her lesson to identify key points of interest to be addressed in her next lesson. We also coded 226 of her pupils’ notes in two KF views for (i) quality of questions and (ii) quality of explanation after each iteration to inform her of her pupils’ knowledge building trajectory and learning. Teachers’ understanding of content and curriculum as captured by a collaborative curriculum map Figure 1. Unpacking the facts, concepts and theories in curriculum on the topic of ‘cells’. Using the knowledge structure of facts, concepts, theories (Erickson, 2006), the teacher with her KB teammates mapped out the curriculum demand of cells (see Figure 1). The concepts identified by the teachers were ‘adaptation, specialisation and functions of cells, ‘interactions of cell parts”. The teachers found it difficult to decide if functions of cells should be a fact to be learned or a concept to be understood. They, nevertheless, decided to place it under concepts, rationalising the fact the pupils need to know the individual functions of the cell parts, then compare and contrast them to derive a common understanding of the overall functions. Lesson 1: Figuring out pupils’ problem of understanding: Idea generation using KF scaffold The teacher started the series of lesson with a KWL activity (what I know/what I want to know/ what I learned) with a rationale of wanting to use what her pupils “do not know” to guide her lesson (see Figure 2). This lesson on “What is a cell?” was conducted over 2 periods (1 hour) in a single seating during curriculum time. The pupils had their one-to-one computing device to facilitate the use of KB during the lesson. “My approach was to simply ask a question “What is a cell?” without giving any clue such that it would tease out pupils’ initial conception and ideas of what a cell was. I did not dictate what the pupils should know. Instead, I wish to know what the pupils do not know as that would better guide me to craft my KB lesson design.” Figure 2. First Knowledge Forum view where pupils posted questions and ideas about cells in a KWL activity. The teacher studied the notes carefully and concluded that the pupils could state that there were different cell types such as egg cell, bacteria cell, plant cell but she identified the following gap. “However, they were not sure which cell had a nucleus. Using their discussions and questions, I thought it was timely to post differences between plant vs animal cells to narrow down to these two cells that they were bouncing ideas about and seemingly asking…” She then picked out the following post, “Is this cell a plant or animal cell?” that inspired her for her second lesson on differences between plant and animal cells. She also identified the following notes that defined pupils’ misconceptions that needed to be addressed quickly. “…pupils mentioned that only animal cells had a nucleus which is a misconception and it was important for me to ensure that this was clarified by the next lesson.” She reflected that the lesson gave her insights to the many variations of ideas pupils had about cells and framed a key context for her next lesson. She was also intrigued by a question from a pupil (see Figure 3) who was able to question beyond the structure and appearance of a cell “What is really a cell? You have shown the structure, not what a cell itself is”. With this understanding of her pupils’ ideas, she was convinced that she should consider alternative cascading “chains” (leading ideas) that could serve as potential pointers for discussion in the next lesson. Figure 3. Pupil’s responding to the question of “What is a cell?” by going beyond the structure of the cell. Lesson 2: Uniqueness of cell (Customized cell scaffold) This second lesson was focused on pupils differentiating plant and animal cells as that addressed pupils’ vague understanding about cells and the cell parts in the first lesson. “I had pupils to use the customised scaffolds to build ideas that were more interconnected with one another and to particularly focus their attention to using key concept related words.” Two pedagogical moves by teacher to allow more independent inquiry from pupils Customised scaffolds (e.g. the cell is different from the other cell because…; this part is important because…) were designed and adopted for pupils to initiate and lead discussions spontaneously. The teacher felt that her original generic scaffolds in KF were rather abstract for her pupils and she wanted to contextualise the scaffolds to a more familiar context for her pupils, i.e. the context of cells. The teacher decided to provide two images to pupils. Instead of directly telling pupils to list out differences between plant and animal cells, the term ‘unique’ was used and unpacked using the scaffolds which were customised for them to ideate anything they knew about the cell parts. “In lesson 2, these pictures specific type of cell, e.g. (see Figure. 4) were posted intentionally but pupils were not informed that they were the human cheek cell and hydrilla leaf cell. However, they were told that the cell on the left was an animal cell and the right was a plant cell. Using this, they had to come up with evidences to support their reasoning. The visual stimulus should help them differentiate that the green cells on the right were plant cells as they had chlorophyll in them and were greener than the cell on the left.” Figure 4. Visualisation to get pupils to think deeper into the differences of plant and animal cells. She observed that the pupils were building on ideas and were making connections from ideas and that was the initial start for scientific concept building. This is also triangulated with the analysis discussed in result section in this paper. As can be seen in result section, pupils’ reasoning of ideas has improved from Lesson 1 to Lesson 2. It was also in this second lesson that the teacher recognised a pattern in pupils’ post on KB that led her to identify some ‘islands of discussions’ (see Figure 5) that highlighted interesting ideas as well as misconceptions on the topic. This was a new strategy discovered to help her to focus and navigate through the multitude of posts made on KB which could be overwhelming. Figure 5. Discussion thread identified by teachers. Discussion thread 1: Interesting ideas identified: Note 1: “the plant cells are greener so I assumed that the plant cells have chlorophyll in them.” Note 2: “ the plant cells are arranged in a structure but the animal cells have no structure. Maybe since the animal cells are irregular, they cannot fit together to make a structure.” Note 3: “…there are only plant cells and animal cells” Note 3: “