From words on the wall, to words with meaning: the articulation of the development of teacher knowledge during the development of teaching procedures to enhance student understanding of molecular biological concepts.

This thesis outlines in detail how, as a classroom Biology teacher, I studied my teaching and my students’ learning in biology. A variety of teaching procedures were developed and explored with the aim of making explicit, the specific biological terminology that is required to learn and communicate understanding of molecular biological concepts. Inclusion of these teaching procedures into classroom instruction provided students with an opportunity to share and communicate their thinking. They also helped students increase awareness of their own learning, in terms of not just what they did and did not know, but also through the ways in which they could further enhance, communicate and manage their own learning. In the process of the development of these teaching procedures, my learning journey and the development of my professional knowledge of practice was extensively documented. The new knowledge and awareness I gained impacted both my thinking and my actions. The thesis therefore provides evidence of how, as a teacher, I learnt to articulate and make explicit the development of my teacher knowledge, and illustrates not only what it looks like, but how it was formed, shaped and extended. As such, the thesis makes clear what it means to capture and portray a teacher’s professional knowledge of practice in ways very different from that which currently exists in the research literature. As a consequence, the thesis contributes to deeper understandings of teaching subject-specific content (e.g., molecular biology) and to the research on teacher knowledge in the broader educational community.