Postdoctoral fellowship awarded to MLFTC assistant professor

Last month, Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College Assistant Professor Bryan Henderson was selected as a 2018 National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow. The fellowship provides funding and professional development to early-career researchers whose projects focus on critical issues in the history, theory or practice of formal or informal education, at the national and international levels. 

The award — of $70,000 — is intended to aid in salary replacement and research expenses during the fellowship. This year, from a pool of 200 applicants, 30 postdoctoral fellows were selected.

Henderson’s research proposal, Development of the Science Dialogue Heuristic: A Framework for Supporting Oral Argumentation will explore how classroom implementation of the SDH (enabling students to discover something themselves) can work to improve the depth in which students express their thinking.

Middle school science teachers will be trained to use a classroom response technology that Henderson developed, to promote argumentation and the resulting oral arguments will provide a testing ground for iterative development of the SDH. Henderson says this research can help support students engage in a new way of learning science and benefit peer-to-peer learning.

Read more about the award.

Watch Henderson discuss some of his research here.