Reasoning and Self Generated Representation in Developing HOT: Implications for Teacher Education and Learning

Teacher Professional Development tends to focus on the teacher or the strategic intent of the school and ignores the learner. Many tests (e.g. PISA, TIMSS) consistently indicate less than satisfactory academic performance in many countries. I argue that the quality of learning and teaching can be enhanced through representational reasoning that involves higher order thinking. This entails use of multiple roles for representations in reasoning, and multiple forms of reasoning and creativity in constructing and interpreting representations. I will provide practical examples of this reasoning in motivating and shaping student learning. The talk reports on how teachers guided students’ thinking and reasoning as they engaged in a sequence of representational challenges. Students verbalized initial understandings of key terms, negotiated with partners their explanations, and tested their adequacy as claims through guided inquiry using simple everyday equipment. I illustrate the key facilitation roles of the teacher and the resultant demands on them. The value of a team-teaching approach is also explored. The activities and questions required students to refine or modify representations of their emerging claims as part of a process of teacher and/or student-led justification, communication and re-representation. Data from classroom observations, transcripts of discussions, and interviews with students and teachers, suggest the value to students’ learning through reasoning with, through and from representations. I will argue that student need to learn how to think rather and this approach leads to enhanced learning and greater engagement.