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Prompting teachers’ constructivereflection: pupils’ questions ascritical incidentsMike Watts a , Steve Alsop a , Gillian Gould a & AmandaWalsh aa Roehampton Institute , London, UKPublished online: 24 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: Mike Watts , Steve Alsop , Gillian Gould & Amanda Walsh(1997) Prompting teachers’ constructive reflection: pupils’ questions as criticalincidents, International Journal of Science Education, 19:9, 1025-1037, DOI:10.1080/0950069970190903

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INT. J. Sci. EDUC., 1997, VOL. 19, NO. 9, 1025-1037

Prompting teachers' constructive reflection:pupils' questions as critical incidents

Mike Watts, Steve Alsop, Gillian Gould and Amanda Walsh, RoehamptonInstitute, London, UK

Constructive reflection is seen as an important ingredient in the professional development of teachers,in order to stimulate significant change in approaches to classroom practice and the general provision ofscience education in schools. This paper explores the use of pupils' questions in provoking 'criticalincidents' in the professional lives of teachers. It is suggested that pupils' questions can be bothindicative of their own conceptual change as well as being sophisticated prompts for teachers to examinetheir own thinking. Case studies of two teachers — one primary and one secondary — are used toilluminate how such critical incidents can lead to changes in teacher thinking, resulting then in changesin classroom practice in science. Suggestions are made for the use of pupils' questions as criticalincidents in the professional development of teachers.

Suppose no one asked a question. What would be the answer} Gertrude Stein

Introduction: critical incidents

Critical incident exercises have been around for over forty years, ever sinceFlanagan (1954) first formulated the technique. In this present paper, a criticalincident is defined as a classroom episode or event which causes a teacher to stopshort and think. More specifically, it is the kind of occurrence which creates aserious pause for pedagogic or scientific thought: a 'decision situation'; where ateacher must draw on scientific and educational rationales in order to resolveconflictual matters. In a recent paper (Nott and Smith 1995) such incidentshave been exemplified as 'practical work which goes wrong', or 'an event whichraises moral and ethical issues about science or scientists'. These kinds of occasionscan arise through the actions of teachers as they stimulate discussion, demonstratea particular experiment or generate class practical work.

Nott and Wellington (1995) have put their analysis of critical incidents to usein a variety of ways. On different occasions these have been used to diagnoseteachers' content knowledge in science, to probe their views on the nature ofscience, to explore teachers' understanding of scientific methods, and to studytheir justifications for adapting and moulding scientific processes in the classroom.They have been deployed to create dialogues with individual teachers and in groupsessions to generate debates and discussions of the nature of teaching and learningin science.

This paper explores the ways in which childrens' questions can provoke criti-cal incidents for science teachers, which suddenly raise teachers' consciousness of

0950-0693/97 $12 • 00 © 1997 Taylor & Francis Ltd.

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1026 M. WATTS ET AL.

both the nature of science and the processes of teaching and learning. Whileteachers' classroom question-and-answer sessions have been subjected to consid-erable scrutiny (Brown and Edmondson 1984), childrens' own questions have onlyreceived very sparse exposure to research (Watts and Alsop 1995, Watts et al.1996). In this article, critical incidents are examined where particular questionshave put two teachers 'on the spot' - and have forced a sudden revision of theirimmediate thoughts, their planned teaching and of their understandings of science.These two cases - one of a primary teacher, one of a secondary school biologist -highlight the power of pupils' questions to forge critical reflection and generateshifts in teachers' thinking and classroom practice.

The use of only two cases raises questions as to the extent of the generalisi-bility of our findings. By definition, a case study is 'the examination of an instancein action' and is said to involve 'some commitment to the study and portrayal ofthe idiosyncratic and the particular as legitimate in themselves' (Walker 1993: 163)However, the present cases were developed as part of a wider enquiry into the formand function of learners' questions (Watts and Alsop 1996). The models we discusshere have been tested against data collected from other classrooms. Work in pro-gress suggests that aspects of the present models have wider application in wayswhich will prove illuminating to those involved in teaching science in schools,colleges and universities.

Teachers' constructive reflection

There is a growing body of research in teachers' thinking (Day et al. 1990, Day etal. 1993, Bell and Gilbert 1996) which adopts qualitative-interpretative approachesto teacher professional development, particularly where this is through critical-reflective techniques. Clark and Petersen's (1986: 255) suggestion is that researchon teachers' constructive reflection hopes to 'understand and explain how and whyobservable activities of teachers' professional lives take on the forms and functionsthat they do'. Diamond (1988: 139) highlights this when he says:

Very little of current education is designed to help students (or their teachers) torecognise their past conceptions on the basis of new experience and to develop per-sonally generated insights and paradigms, even though these learning processes mayreflect higher stages of development.

One such approach has been through the use of critical incidents (Denicoloand Pope 1990, Hanke 1990), where teachers are invited to reflect on their profes-sional lives through the articulation and explication of particularly evocative orremarkable incidents in their daily activities. In some cases the incidents are self-selected and in others they are generated through 'stimulated recall' (Calderhead1981). The purpose of this provoked reflection is to prompt teachers into delib-erating upon and modifying their approaches to many facets of their professionalresponsibilities, in this case their relationship with the subject disciplines of scienceand their practice within their science classrooms. In Habermas's (1971: 35) terms:

Self-reflection leads to insights due to the fact that what has previously been uncon-scious is made conscious in a manner rich in practical consequences: analytic insightsintervene in life, if I may borrow this dramatic phrase from Wittgenstein.

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PUPILS' QUESTIONS AS CRITICAL INCIDENTS 1027

Learners' questions in science

The research of Graesser and Person (1994: 104) asserts that:

It is well documented that student questions are very infrequent and unsophisticated;. . . They are normally shallow, short-answer questions that address the content andinterpretation of explicit material; they are rarely high-level questions that involveinferences, multistep reasoning, the application of an idea to a new domain of knowl-edge, the synthesis of a new idea from multiple information sources, or the evaluationof a new claim.

In this paper we take issue with this conclusion, from two distinct perspec-tives. We do not dispute the paucity of pupil questioning - this has been docu-mented over time and in different settings, for example, in primary classrooms inthe UK (Elstgeests 1985) and in secondary classrooms in the USA (Carlsen 1991,Commeyras 1995). We challenge, instead, the implication that learners cannotroutinely ask sophisticated questions of teachers.

Question-asking requires conditions of trust

The first part of this claim is that pupils' questions can be indicative of shifts intheir conceptualisations of parts of science. This follows Woodward's (1992: 15)point that:

A reason for fostering children's interrogative skills is that, by posing questions,pupils are shaping and exposing their thoughts and hence opportunities will be pro-vided for teachers to have some insight into children's thinking and conceptual under-standing. Questions asked by children can lead teachers towards making appropriateassessments of children's understanding or, alternatively, their misconceptions.

From this view, many questions are posed for reasons of conceptualisation, forthinking aloud, for conjecture and exploration. Learners' questions have the capa-city to expose thinking in all its sophistication or naivety, to tackle issues of broadcomplexity or to focus onto minutiae and detail. Indeed, many questions areprobably more in the way of open 'thought experiments' (Helm et al. 1985) andare not intended to be made formal, or even necessarily to be answered. These arethe 'What would happen if . . . ?', 'Why is it that . . . ? ' , 'If this, then why not . . . ?'kind. Questions like 'Why do spiders have eight legs (and not two like humans)?','How many times do insects feed in a day?', 'Is the sky cold?' are more by way ofexploration of a situation than a request for a simple answer (Alsop 1994, Wattsand Alsop 1995).

As Lemke (1990) argues, it is not uncommon for pupils to find the content andcontext of lessons confusing, that the things being said by teacher or peers do notmake sense. Sometimes incomprehension or frustration will build to the pointwhere a pupil will ask for clarification, to 'fill a semantic link in the chain neededto make sense of what is being said' (p. 27). When a student asks such a question,the teacher will commonly check to see if the answer provided is satisfactory. But,as Lemke points out, sometimes a pupil will find not a gap in the meanings beingused, but a contradiction between what is being said and the conceptual frameworkthe pupil is using. Then, a pupil may question or challenge what the teacher hasexplained. As Lemke says:

It takes a lot of frustration, and not a little self-confidence, for a student to do this.Perhaps it happens more often silently than out loud, but when it does happen

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publicly we get a rare glimpse of the differences in thematic patterns that lie behind somany odd-sounding student questions and so much of the miscommunication andconfusion that occurs in everyday classrooms, (p. 18)

Classroom conditions, then, are paramount in fostering or inhibiting a'question rich environment' (Watts et al. 1997). Simply because the asking of aquestion can generate such exposure and vulnerability, learners need secure cir-cumstances before they will risk a question of any import. That is, where theclassroom conditions are appropriate, learners will ask a wide range of questions.These may vary from the merely curious, where any answer is of only passingconsequence, to those questions which reveal deep consternation and troubledthinking, and where the form and detail of the teacher's response is highly sig-nificant. Conversely, where classroom conditions are not appropriate, learners willnot venture questions except, perhaps, the most transactional or procedural formof inquiry. Trust is a necessary ingredient for open questions.

Teachers control question rich environments (QREs)

The creation of an environment which fosters question-asking and question-answering is greatly dependent on teacher confidence. This is confidence in notjust the minutiae of subject content knowledge but also in the capacity to exerciserelaxed authority and control within the classroom. Research to date suggests thatteachers need secure conditions before they will countenance the risk of pupilsasking 'difficult' questions. Woodward (1992: 17), for example, maintains that'teachers who feel unsure of their own knowledge base tacitly avoid or represspupils' questions in science.' Biddulph and Carr (1992), too, have highlightedthe role of teacher anxiety concerning their own subject knowledge - an anxietywhich, they say, inhibits not only the quality of teacher questions but also of pupilquestions.

Faced with the possibility of an array of pupils' questions, teachers tradition-ally exercise a number of options. In a 'traditional classroom' the possibilities forthe teacher faced with critical incidents such as these have been to:

• ignore the question, change the subject of discussion and move on;• give the best answer available for the moment and then close the implied

challenge ('Does that answer your question, Cheryl?');• admit ignorance and the need for help ('I'm not really sure - I'll have to look

that up');• turn the question back to the pupil ('And what do you think, Kirsty?') or into

a 'three turn sequence' (Lemke 1990) so as to allow the teacher to regaincontrol and get back on track;

• change the incident into an empirical question for investigation ('That's agood question, John, we could test it out').

In terms of the latter, the OPENS Project (Jones et al. 1992) describes howteachers have offered secondary pupils the opportunity to develop their own ques-tions relating to laboratory investigations. Fairbrother (1988) suggests that posinga question and formulating an hypothesis are often linked together, leading to theidentification of a practical problem; and points out that, since not all questionsraised by children are necessarily expressed in formal terms amenable to empiricaltest, it is therefore one part of the teachers' job to facilitate the translation of thesequestions into testable hypotheses. This approach has been developed by some

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PUPILS' QUESTIONS AS CRITICAL INCIDENTS 1029

who, like Watts (1994) and Roychoudhury and Roth (1996) have used 'open-ended' or 'open-inquiry' methods to shape investigative laboratory activities,where the responsibility for task management and organisation is largely devolvedto the student.

Such issues of classroom control are ever present. Good et al. (1987) andWood and Wood (1988), for example, illustrate how teacher control of questioningconstantly encourages student passivity, and that pupils do not ask questionsbecause they are inhibited from drawing control away from the teacher. In generalterms, studies like Hand and Treagust (1994) and Jofili et al. (in press) have foundteachers to be insecure in changing any significant part of their classroom practicebecause of the fear of losing classroom control.

Pupil questions and constructivism

At the core of constructivism (Tobin and Tippins 1993) is the belief that learnerscreate perturbations in their thinking, perturbations which arise from theirattempts to give meaning to particular experiences through the imaginative useof existing knowledge. One implication of this for the constructivist teacher (Wattset al. 1997) is their 'mediation' of the learning of students where the 'focus ought tobe on the learners rather than the discipline' (p. 9). This mediation recognises theimportance of learners testing the viability of knowledge claims, so that

teachers must consider how to provide opportunities for such testing through nego-tiations with students and by providing opportunities for problem solving, (p. 11)

Tobin and Tippins go on to suggest that while it is not usual to find teachers whorequire learners to generate questions and seek answers to them, the constructionof questions is an important way for learners to build conceptual conflict, and thesearch for answers may begin the process of resolving that conflict.

Bliss (1995) discusses 'constructivist inspired teaching' which she sees as:• encouraging pupils to autonomous and to show initiative;• providing opportunities for pupils to interact with each other and the teacher;• allowing pupils' thinking to drive lessons, which means being flexible about

content and teaching strategy during the lesson;• encouraging pupils to ask thoughtful and open-ended questions, allowing lots

of 'wait time' for questions, and asking students to elaborate what they meanby them.

Such a learner-driven approach is consistent with Dewey's (1944: 152) recommen-dation that 'genuine' as opposed to 'stimulated' questions be at the centre of oureducational efforts to foster 'good habits of thinking'. Our previous reports (Wattsand Alsop 1996, Watts et al. 1997) have used a constructivist perspective to discussevidence for three categories of pupils' questions, which are seen to illuminatedistinct periods in the process in conceptual change.

Consolidation questionsThese are described as learners' attempts to elucidate issues, delineate the

rationale for classroom tasks, confirm explanations and consolidate understandingof new ideas in science. These questions are seen as attempts to clarify conceptualissues. Pupils may feel they have grasped an idea, or the structure of an argument,and are testing for reassurance that this is in fact the case.

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Exploratory questionsThese relate to pupils' questions where the questioner, having reached a sense

of conviction in his or her understanding, then uses the security of this 'base camp'to launch a few 'sorties' or 'safaris' into the neighbouring terrain. At this stage, a'position of strength' (Gould 1995), pupils' questions seek to both expandknowledge and test constructs that they have formed.

Elaborative questionsLearners are seen to lack conviction about either their own frameworks of

understanding or those on offer to them. They examine claims and counterclaims,elaborating and challenging both their previous knowledge and experience, andthat being presented to them. This period has been called a 'point of plasticity'(Gould 1995). Questions are of the 'Well . . . if that's the case, then . . . whyno t . . . ?' 'But what happens if . . . ?' and 'Why, then, is it not possible to . . . ?'Questions within this category are attempts to reconcile different understandings,resolve conflicts, test circumstances, force issues, track in and around the ideas andtheir consequences. Such questions may have some direct relevance to the class-room topic being taught, though questions may be triggered by tangential issues orare stimulated by something from outside the class entirely.

Critical incidents: perceptions from two case studies

The major point of interest in this paper is the extent to which learners' questionscan create critical incidents for teachers. While one aspect of this is the way inwhich pupils' questions create anxiety in the face of scientific self doubt anduncertainty, teachers may also feel threatened for pedagogic reasons - their pre-paration and lesson plans may need to be altered 'on the hoof. Powerful questions'from the floor' can unseat even the most well prepared of teachers.

The data for these two studies were gathered by the teachers themselves dur-ing the course of their own studies of teacher-pupil classroom interactions. In thefirst study, Teacher A developed a diary-based approach (Walsh 1993) so that,over a period of several months, she recorded accounts of her work with children inher class. The accounts were written each evening as she attempted to 'intraview'herself (Watts and Walsh 1997) on the key features of the day, using a narrativestyle and recording her 'internal conversations and questions' as a regular diary.Similarly, in the second case, Teacher G's accounts span a three-month periodwhich involved her in the writing of a personal log of her work with several classes.However, she also tape-recorded lessons, as well as some of her one-to-oneconversations with pupils (Gould 1995).

Case study one: from a primary classroom

Primary teachers are sharply aware of their own impoverished knowledge andconfidence in science (Walsh 1993), and they tend to compensate by restrictingthe range of activities and interactions with pupils. Many neglect or avoid science(Whitby 1990). Quite normally they carefully formulate their planning, organisa-tion, assessment and materials and more tightly manage and control learning situa-tions to minimise 'exposure' of their own limited expertise. In the first case, A'sawareness of her personal inadequacies prompts her to search further for answers.

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She undertakes a series of tutorials in order to address her own appreciation of thegaps in her scientific knowledge. In this instance she is tussling with her ownconceptions and what she recalls of textbook physics. She is teaching about thephysics of force and gravity to her primary class. She first discusses aspects of herown science education:

At school I studied science because I was intrigued by the mysterious and magicalworkings of the universe which I believed science would explain. But I soon realisedthe answers to my many questions were not about to be revealed. Instead I received afew garbled transmissions from my imperturbable science teacher, who held the keyto the 'big ideas' of science, but was unable to share with understanding. Before long Iidentified the problem, the science truths are written in a kind of 'science-speak', aforeign language which denied access to science unless I achieved fluency. Science-speak was for me the language of the brave new world and I was silenced and frus-trated by its complexity. 'Reactionary Forces', 'Weight = Mass x ION', 'Gravity'.What language is this? What does it mean? I know that gravity keeps us all on theearth, but how does it? When questioned further about the nature of science, myteacher wrote the answers determinedly in CAPITAL LETTERS as if this wouldsomehow stamp the science truths firmly in my mind. But the science-speak failedand I was left alone with my questions. Now I am a primary teacher of science and mybiggest fear is that I am not a scientist. I do not hold the 'big ideas' of science in myhead and I still have no access to them.

In the following extract, despite her preparations, she is quite suddenly'undone' by the questions in her class. She is aware of the critical moment drawingever closer even while she is engaged in the usual turmoil of a class session and thearrival of another adult to find out what she wants to eat for lunch:

Today in Year 3 we are doing concept maps so I can assess the children's ideas offorce. First, I lead a brainstorming session to collect the key words. I begin to feelquite confident as the eight-year-olds bombard me with their suggestions of gravity,weight, forcemeters, pull and push, and rapidly I write them all down. As I scroll thelast couple of words my inner speech starts asking questions and not answering them.

How am I going to explain this?Do all these words really connect together?What do the forcemeters we all made measure, gravity or weight?How would a scientist define the relationship between gravity and weight? I'm suremass comes into the big ideas somewhere.Mass remains constant I know that. So what!

My head is buzzing with a constant flow of garbled messages, mostly in the form ofrelated questions each one leading me deeper and deeper into a fog of confusion. I tryto think what the text book said but I can't remember. What did Mike say? I can'tremember that either. The inner conversation with myself goes on but it does notrequire my full concentration because I am still asking Dean to sit down and I am ableto tell the school secretary what I want for lunch. My private dialogue exsits on adeeper level of consciousness than everyday talk to such an extent that I am able tocarry on doing my job whilst simultaneously engaging in a completely private con-versation. I regularly find myself in this confusing state where my thoughts are splitup onto different planes of consciousness.

When everything goes quiet in the classroom I ask the children to draw lines betweenthe words they want to connect together and to explain their reasons for doing so. Thefirst is James, he joins forcemeter to gravity and says, 'It measures how much gravitythere is, doesn't it?'. Next he looks at me expectantly for an answer but the truth isthat I am in a state of total confusion and I'm beginning to feel a little panicked as 29other faces stare at mine. Automatically I go into my, 'there's no right or wronganswer routine'. Usually this is a 'cop-out' but today I convince myself it's true.

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This kind of incident was instrumental in creating considerable conceptualchange in A's thinking about parts of physics, the nature of science and the rela-tionship between teaching and learning, both for herself and for her primaryclassroom pupils. As she says:

Writing my thoughts and beliefs on a regular basis has led me to question myselfconstantly. Everything was analysed as I reflected on ideas present and past. Self-reflection is unavoidable when writing a diary and it is the act of reflection thatrepresents an essential condition for the enrichment of ideas. In the entries I keepreferring back to previous incidents and ideas and try to review my constructs and myactions in the light of new experience.

Her explorations of the concepts of science through her pupils' questions act alsoto force her to question and change her own views on the nature of science:

I had never seen this before. Energy, force, light, gravity — everything — can beexplained in terms of a formula. It makes it sound so easy, to explain the workingsof the universe just using clumps of letters and numbers, short little 'one-liners'.Providing, of course, that you know science-speak. However it does make me reallywonder about the nature of science itself, as abstract formulae, objective, hard-nosedand truly out of reach, or is that just my image of science? Isn't this abstractness whatgives science its exclusivity, denying access to all those who are not members of thescientists' club?

Case study two: from a secondary classroom

Teacher G has taken recent opportunities in her science teaching to explore thenature of pupils' questions, and to monitor her own responses to these (Gould1995). She begins her narrative from a quizzical sense of self awareness as shebegins to listen to the form and function of pupils' questions:

I'd never though too much about the pupils as questioners. I scarcely noticed that ithappened beyond the 'Miss, where are the Bunsen burners?' variety. I certainlyhadn't invested their questioning with any significant role in terms of the pupils'learning or for that matter, as having a role in mine . . . The only times that I reallynoticed the pupils questioning, I noticed them because they were such unusual events.When they did happen, I can remember feeling staggered by the quality of the ques-tions, the sophistication, both in terms of what the question was trying to find out andthe depth of perception which they showed.

G is an experienced biologist and A-level (pre-university) teacher. During theweeks of her study and exploration she began to appreciate the positive use thatcould be made of taking pupils' questions seriously. She quickly, too, came face-to-face with students' questions as critical incidents. As an illustration, shedescribes an A-level student (David) whose questions, she feels, sought both toexpand his knowledge and test her role as 'expert'. She says:

At times, this position is frightening, especially as I realise that he has taken mebeyond my own secure constructs and I am forced to explore my own understanding,to become a co-learner . . . I find myself under pressure as I am continually challengedto justify my position even if I am justifying what is to me, a topic that I think Iunderstand.

At the time, David's class was studying genetics and genetically inherited condi-tions. A classroom discussion took place about haemoglobin and differencesbetween fetal and adult haemoglobin. At this point, David asked 'Given thatfetal haemoglobin has a greater affinity for oxygen, is it also more reluctant to

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release it in the embryo?' The question was probing the fact that haemoglobin hasa measured affinity for oxygen which changes with the oxygen concentration towhich it is exposed. A foetus produces haemoglobin that is slightly different to theadult molecule and has a slightly different pattern of oxygen affinity. G says:

When you normally teach pupils about the relevance of this, you usually only mentionits higher affinity compared to the adult's at the same partial pressure of oxygen andhence its ability to remove oxygen from the mother's blood in the placenta; indeedthis was the way I'd been taught. David's question had me thinking. I'd never reallythought about what happened in the tissues before.

For G this question was a critical incident: even as an experienced biologist ithighlighted gaps in her own understanding, forcing her to test her own constructs,find evidence, test them against her current understanding and extend her think-ing. In these circumstances, she noted, as teacher she became a learner — 'an eventthat can do nothing but enhance one's teaching':

You are then reminded quite graphically of the feeling that your pupils are likely to beexperiencing . . . You empathise more effectively with them as they try to make senseof new and - to them - abstruse ideas.

It was an incident that was critical, too, in that it invoked insights into both G'sbeliefs and principles of teaching and learning and her views of science education:

You have planned the week's lessons. You have an overview of where you want thelesson to go - indeed, for the whole topic to go. Because you've studied it, andprobably taught it for many years, your constructs are firmly in place and they'reprobably all the orthodox, scientific ones. Then, up goes a hand and a pupil asks asuperb question. It has all the qualities: it shows insight, uses previous information,shows curiosity, is a tentative fitting of the pupil's ideas into established scientific fact- and it's at exactly the wrong moment. You want to do this next week. I can admitthat I used to ignore these, fob off the pupil with some waffle and forget it everhappened. I can't, though, now believe I really used to do that. It's as if I've gainedanother sense, another way of getting insight into 'where each pupil is at'.

In terms of science education, she says:

My view of science education has changed and I now think of it as not as passing onscientific information but about coming to share (at some level) in consensually heldtheories. And one can only share in the consensus if one is sure that communicationhas taken place and that a common understanding is held by the communicants.Questioning is an essential part of this process. My role as a science teacher, therefore,is to bring my pupils to this state of shared understanding of meaning. I can be at mymost effective when the pupil has received information, possibly from several sources,and is trying to create a coherent meaning from them, where a learner is trying outpatterns before establishing a stable picture. They sometimes return again and againto an issue, trying to find a form of language to establish both personal and socialmeaning as an accurate reflection of the process that is taking place in their minds.Questions have to be framed by the questioner. I would therefore see that they are afar more reliable tool for 'judging where the pupil is at' than any other form oflanguage. They are words that the questioner has taken from their own thinkingand are not simply a parroting of words that they think the teacher wishes to hear.

She describes how her interaction with the students changed, first, in the wayshe re-organised her classroom work:

My responses are changing. Because I am paying more attention to questions, I findmy pupils asking questions more often. I praise questions more than I used to. Thequality of questions has improved. As my pupils see me giving status to questions,they in turn are more prepared to listen to their colleagues and less likely to scoff at

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what would have been thought of as 'stupid' in the previous climate. More pupils findthe confidence to start asking aloud the questions that presumably had been pre-viously confined to the corners of their minds. At times, there were so many questionsthat I have had to develop strategies for preventing my lessons from being takentotally off the planned course. With the best will in the world, I still have to deliverthe National Curriculum! Simple strategies include asking the student to note downtheir questions for later, to come and talk to me after the lesson, or suggesting anothersource for finding an answer, such as the library - and then coming to tell me theanswer that they have found.

She changed also in the attitudes she developed towards pupils' questions:

During these 'real' discussions, around real questions, there would be an acceptancethat it was all right not to know everything. My views would still be sought, I wouldstill be seen as a source of information but there was a feeling of equality. In someways, because I didn't know, it was fine too for the pupil not to know. I wasn'tshameful, it didn't have to be hidden behind silence or a rote answer to a question.The guilt between us used to arise because I had a lesson plan, scheme of work, aprogramme of study, the attainment target to teach. If I followed a red herring —sometimes an entire shoal - then I would have wasted all that time allowing the pupilsto dictate the direction of the lesson, and not me. There was real fear in me that I'drelinquished some control, I was no longer leading the class.

Discussion

Pope and Denicolo (1986: 156) maintain that, in educational research, 'authenticitymust be tempered with utility'. In the context of our cases, this would mean thatthose pragmatic aspects of the data important for considering pedagogic implica-tions, or which might usefully inform future research, must be balanced againstthe nuances which imbue the studies with richness. Such a balance puts a heavyresponsibility on the researchers: Pope and Denicolo sub-titled their paper 'aresearcher's dilemma'. We hope, in this paper, to have taken a careful line betweenthe two horns.

In our view, two main issues arise for discussion.

Fortune favours the prepared mind

Some teachers might question just how 'fortunate' they are to be at the receivingend of pupils' penetrating questions. However, the pupil can be as instrumental inprompting professional reflection as any other stimulus. Learners' questions ascritical classroom incidents have the power to root reflection within the immediacyof the professional context: with the teaching and learning of concepts, with theintricacies of the subject, with the contest presented by trying to grasp the intel-lectual complexities of the topic itself and then render this meaningful to anexpectant audience.

We clearly favour a 'question rich environment' where questions are encour-aged and promoted as part of the fabric of the lesson, as a quintessential ingredientof the scientific endeavour. This entails changing classroom practice both to gen-erate and deal with pupils' questions: creating lists of questions, evaluating 'good'and 'bad' ones, debating the nature of scientific questions, a confidential 'questionbox' at the side of the room - along with a range of other measures (Watts andAlsop 1995). To this extent the teacher is primed for queries - while good

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questions can still be critical incidents, they lose the power to be negative,unconstructive or to intellectually immobilise the recipient.

There's no gain without pain

Nott and Wellington (1995) have well illustrated the use of critical incidents aseffective components in teacher professional courses and we see the use of learner-questions-as-critical-incidents as a fruitful line in this development. So far, thishas entailed first engaging teachers in critical thinking, to which end we haveworked with both experienced teachers and those in initial training. As part ofthese activities we have encouraged the collection and analysis of pupils' questions,either through overt classroom strategies, or through the use of personal diariesand logs (Watts and Walsh 1997). We have also designed a two-week INSET (in-service) course (Jofili et al. in press) congruent with constructivist teacher educa-tion research of the kind Bastos (1992) and Hand and Treagust (1994) describe. Inshaping our course, we began from four assumptions:

1. It is essential to provide opportunities for teachers to experience construc-tivism, reflection and critical thinking throughout the provision of theINSET course.

2. The practice of constructivism requires teachers to confront problematicquestions, intellectual difficulties and academic shortfalls which enablethem to experience conceptual change for themselves.

3. Teachers need to apply their growing awareness of learning issues throughdeveloping action research projects in their own classrooms.

4. The accumulative effects of the course and such action research projectsmust generate long term change in their everyday classroom practice.

In our limited experience, in this on-going phase of the research, we have seenthe potential for learner-questions-as-critical-incidents to generate considerablereflection, dialogue and debate. Such incidents have given rise to reflectionsabout classroom practice in general and, being learner-sensitive, reflections onthe aims and objectives of science education and about the nature of science.

We leave the last word to an astronomer and science educator who says:First, my questions are just that, they are my questions. They spring from within meand have been formed by my experience of the world. Further, it is these questionsthat motivate my research. Much more than answers, I search for meaningful ques-tions. In our attempts to represent science before our students, do we do justice to thenature of questions? (Martin and Brouwer 1993: 444)

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