Using contrasting video cases of the enactment of cognitively demanding science tasks in professional development

Prior research indicated the challenges of getting students to think at high levels as they work on cognitively demanding tasks. Teachers often unwittingly lower the cognitive demands of tasks during their enactment. We argue that teachers should be provided with opportunities that can support them to make sense of the ways in which teachers' actions can be consequential for the level and type of thinking in which students engage. In this paper, we examined how the use of contrasting video cases can support participants' learning to identify the ways in which teachers' actions shape students' opportunities to think and reason during their engagement with cognitively complex instructional tasks. Qualitative analysis of two sequential professional development sessions revealed that contrasting video cases supported participants' productive discussions about teacher's pedagogical actions and the ways that these actions shaped how students work on cognitively demanding tasks.