The new vision of science learning involves students figuring out how and why natural phenomena occur. Teaching to support this vision involves situating instruction in the context of a high-quality anchoring phenomenon and being responsive to students' developing ideas about how and why the phenomenon occurs. In order to be responsive to students' thinking, teachers must first elicit students' thinking. However, eliciting student' thinking can be challenging for preservice science teachers, who often have little or no prior experience learning science in ways that are in line with the new vision and have limited exposure to (and understanding of) students' alternative ways of thinking about how and why natural phenomena occur. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to explore how preservice teachers elicit student thinking about an anchoring phenomenon and how understanding of student ideas, informed by learning progressions, might support their elicitations. We attempted to help preservice teachers learn to elicit and work with students' science ideas in a semester-long secondary science methods course at our large, midwestern university. We introduced learning progressions to provide an explicit focus on student thinking and engaged preservice teachers in rehearsals of teaching practice using the Ambitious Science Teaching (AST) framework. This research presents case studies of two preservice teachers engaging in cycles of planning, enacting, and reflecting on microteaching three AST-based lessons to their methods course peers. Findings indicate that both preservice teachers in this study drew on the same three characteristics to elicit student thinking. The first two characteristics are (1) ability to segment the anchoring phenomenon into distinct periods of change or action and (2) alignment between the anchoring phenomenon and the grade-level appropriate Disciplinary Core Idea(s) in the NGSS Performance Expectation. The third characteristic, "features," emerged from the two cases and are defined as substantive details that (a) illustrate changes explained by the Disciplinary Core Idea(s), (b) can be drawn from to elicit student thinking about the Disciplinary Core Idea(s), and (c) specify distinct periods of the anchoring phenomenon. Findings also indicate that both preservice teachers were attentive to student ideas from the learning progressions when planning for, eliciting student thinking during, and reflecting on their microteaching lessons. Implications of these findings for teacher education are provided.
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