Louca, Loucas T.

We investigate how a teacher's personal reflection shapes her decision-making process in classroom management. Following open coding, we analyze the teachers' reflections seeking to identify her rationale in the decision-making process during the language arts lessons. Our findings indicated that her thinking was based on the student's behavior, the student's personality, the educational context, her own emotional perspective and condition, her pedagogical knowledge, and her reflective experience. We discuss the theoretical and methodological implications.

Despite its proven added value, Modeling-based Learning(MbL) in science is not commonly incorporated into early grades science education. Following a growing body of research on using MbL in early grades, this multi-case study seeks to provide detailed descriptions of the implementation of MbL with 3 groups of pre-K children engaged in the study of three different phenomena, taught by 3 different teachers participating in a professional development program of pre-school science education. Findings across the different cases suggest that participating pre-school children were successfully engaged in authentic MbL activities and developed several different types of models using knowledge and experiences, as well as a variety of features of both analogical and mechanistic reasoning. I use this evidence to argue that (a)different MbL tools may afford different learning opportunities; (b)pre-school children have modeling resources that can use to utilize different tools using MbL in natural ways of young children learning (e.g.,playing).