Telephone number:	+31 (0)71 527 6589
E-Mail:	wieringan@vuw.leidenuniv.nl
Faculty / Department:	ICLON, Voortgezet Onderwijs, Onderzoek
Office Address:	Willem Einthoven gebouw Wassenaarseweg 62A 2333 AL Leiden Room number B2.40
Telephone number:	+31 (0)71 527 2727
E-Mail:	wieringan@vuw.leidenuniv.nl
Faculty / Department:	ICLON, Voortgezet Onderwijs, Lerarenopleiding
Office Address:	Willem Einthoven gebouw Wassenaarseweg 62A 2333 AL Leiden

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Curriculum vitae

I studied biology in Utrecht, with a special interest in tropical ecology. After my studies she started teaching nature and environmental education, where I was infected by the enthusiasm for education. I graduated from the ICLON Graduate School of Teaching in 2006 and started teaching biology at the Zandvlietcollege in The Hague, which I continued to do until now, while doing my PhD project at ICLON. In my research, I am interested in unraveling the interplay between teachers’ practical knowledge and their design of innovative lessons.

Research

There is an international trend in science education towards context-based approaches. If concepts are taught in relationship to real-world contexts, science education is expected to become more meaningful, relevant and motivating for students. In biology education in the Netherlands an innovation process towards context-based education is currently taking place. As in any innovation, the outcome will largely depend on the teachers implementing it.

The focus of this study is on biology teachers designing context-based lessons for their own classroom practice. The first part of my research consisted of six case studies of teachers who designed innovative lessons while thinking aloud. Thinking aloud protocols, lesson plans, videotapes lessons and interviews were used to answer the following questions:

1. what is the relation between teacher’s practical knowledge and their design of innovative lessons? 
2. how do their lesson designs relate to formal innovative lesson characteristics?

The first results of my study revealed that teachers, when designing innovative lessons, think in terms of personal rules-of-thumb. These personal rules-of-thumb were more powerful in determining the lesson design than formal innovative goals and lesson characteristics. The results also showed that the personal rules- of thumb were connected to goals the teachers set for themselves and for their students. These goals, such as  “activating prior knowledge”, “showing the relevance of the subject  matter”, “creating a good working atmosphere in the classroom” or “offering students a variety of activities” appeared to be hierarchically related. This reminds one of the concept of goal hierarchies in the field of cognitive psychology. Goal systems theory has, to our knowing, not been systematically applied to the study of teacher knowledge before.

In the second part of my study, we aimed at

1. describing and testing a promising set of design principles which we used to design a professional development program to support teachers who design innovative biology lessons for their own classroom practice
2. exploring the use of goal system theory to understand and predict the changes in teachers’ knowledge under influence of this professional development program.

We hypothesized that the individual teachers’ goal system could be used to understand the teacher’s interpretation of the innovation and that, more specifically, the goals with many connections to other goals would the most influential.

This research was funded by the DUDOC program (http://www.dudocprogramma.nl/)

Key publications

Wieringa, N., Janssen, F., & Van Driel, J.  (2009, September). Biology teachers as designers of context-based lessons. Paper presented at the ESERA Conference, Istanbul.

Wieringa, N. (2011). Teachers’ educational design as a process of reflection-in-action: the lessons we can learn from Donald Schön’s The Reflective Practitioner when studying the professional practice of teachers as educational designers. Curriculum Inquiry, 41(1), 167-174.

Wieringa, N., Janssen, F., & Van Driel, J. (2011). Biology teachers designing context -based lessons for their classroom practice - the importance of rules-of-thumb. International Journal of Science Education, 33(17), 2437-2462.

Wieringa, N., Janssen, F., De Hullu, E. & Van Driel, J. (2012, September). The practical knowledge of biology teachers who learn to design context-based lessons. Paper presented at the ERIDOB Conference, Berlin.