Towards a Better Understanding of Science Teaching

The specialist knowledge and skills of science teachers is far too easily overlooked and undervalued, due, in part, to the tacit nature of the knowledge that underpins expert science teachers’ practice. For science teachers to better recognize, describe, and share their professional knowledge there is a need to develop new and meaningful ways through which it might be captured and articulated. The notion of a New Science described in this paper offers one way of doing this and, combined with a focus on the importance of teacher education, presents real ways of helping to influence views of such knowledge. This paper argues that using a New Science approach in teacher preparation might help to change the way that science teachers view the development of theory from practice. In so doing, as the tacit aspects of practice are made increasingly explicit, so might the expectations of a shared language of expert practice of science teaching and learning be apprehended and enhanced.