As you can see, there are a lot of resources on this website. Depending upon your role in schools, you’ll want a plan for exploring these. We have recommended pathways for:
Individual teachers or groups of teachers working together
If you are a teacher working to improve your practice—either individually or with a group—there are some resources that you should become familiar with first. These explain some of the key ideas underlying ambitious teaching. Only then will the other tools and resources on this site make good sense to you. It would be helpful to dedicate a few months to becoming familiar with these ideas and experimenting with them in your classroom.
The quick glance below shows the combinations of videos and readings that will help you get started. The full rationale for each step is in the 1-9 written sequence below.
1. Begin with the Get Started page—read the overview text and then really dive into the five Orientation videos (below the text). It helps to watch these videos with others and discuss as you go. You’ll notice that we have a guide for how to get the most from watching videos—its located to the lower right of each video series page.
2. Next we recommend reading the Discourse Primer. The reason for the focus on talk is that it provides so many opportunities for student reasoning. This primer provides a basic vocabulary for you around different forms of talk and questioning that will be useful as you observe your own classroom, and as you watch the videos on this website. Groups of teachers could spend an entire year just studying and working on opportunities for productive talk that goes on in the classroom.
3. From here you could read Planning for Engagement with Important Science Ideas, then choose one or two of the teacher video cases to see and hear how these individuals planned units around anchoring events. Anchoring events are described in the document. These resources are important because they explain the first of the four core practices. The other sets of practices will make better sense if you see how teachers plan for students to explain a complex phenomenon over time, and use modeling as a practice to accomplish much of this work.
4. Explore the practices under Eliciting Students’ Ideas. Read the introduction and choose one of the cases in the Video Gallery (middle school, high school, elementary examples are there, and full units are provided) that shows this practice set. Ask yourself as you watch, what kinds of intellectual work are students asked to do here? How is the teacher using specialized talk, tasks, and tools to help all learners participate?
5. Before you read about the remaining two of the four core practice sets, we recommend that you read the Models and Modeling Introduction. At this point, you will have noted in the videos that students are asked to draw out representations of their thinking about the anchoring event. These drawings will change over time in response to new ideas and evidence. The document will help you understand the science practice of modeling and how variations of this can happen in your classroom.
6. At this point you can explore the practice set of Supporting On-going Changes in Student Thinking. Read this introductory document and watch the video segments for the teacher cases you’ve chosen.
7. Next it would be helpful to read the document on Face-to-Face Tools, and also a downloadable document. In the videos you’ve already watched, about Eliciting Students’ Ideas and Supporting On-going Changes in Students’ Thinking, you’ll see different ways the teachers help organize students’ ideas and make them public so they can be added to and revised over time. You’ll understand much more of what appears on the walls of the classroom as you watch the full sequences of these videos.
8. Finally, you can explore the Pressing for Evidence-based Explanations practices (Tools > Planning tools), by reading this introductory document and watching the final set of videos in the teacher case that you have chosen (this is where you’ll see the practices in this set used). You can ask: What ideas did students seem to understand? What gaps were left in their explanations? How did the teachers scaffold students’ drawing and writing tasks?
9. There are many more resources on the site for you to explore (check out the Resources page and use the selection tools Category>, Role>, Type>, Quadrant> to help filter tools), and this can be done however you choose. If you have only watched the videos of one teacher, we urge you to watch a second teacher, just to see the productive variations of these core practice sets and the tools they use with students. What is important now is to conduct principled experiments with your own practice. This is best done in collaboration with others.
Teacher educators working with novices
If you are a teacher educator, you are likely considering what parts of ambitious teaching can be addressed within the time frame of a methods course or across a preparation program.
We recommend that you first get acquainted with the 4-practice framework by following a pathway similar to that described for an individual teacher. So that means going back to the top of this page and following that sequence first. You might even explore these resources in the company of local K-12 science teachers.
Here is an un-annotated version of steps 1-9, described much more fully above in the pathway for individual teachers (with important rationale included, please look there):
1. Begin with the Get Started page.
2. Next we recommend reading the Discourse Primer.
3. From here you could read Planning for Engagement with Important Science Ideas, then choose one or two of the teacher video cases (in Video Gallery) to see and hear how these individuals planned units around anchoring events.
4. Explore the practices under Eliciting Students’ Ideas. Read the introduction and choose one of the cases in the Video Gallery (middle school, high school, elementary examples are there, and full units are provided) that shows this practice set.
5. Before you read about the remaining two of the four core practice sets, we recommend that you read the Models and Modeling Introduction.
6. At this point you can explore the practice set of Supporting On-going Changes in Student Thinking. Read this introductory document and watch the video segments for the teacher cases you’ve chosen.
7. Next it would be helpful to read the document on Face-to-Face Tools.
8. Finally, you can explore the Pressing for Evidence-based Explanations practices, by reading this introductory document and watching the final set of videos in the teacher case that you have chosen.
9. There are many more resources on the site for you to explore (check out the Resources page and use the selection tools Category>, Role>, Type>, Quadrant> to help filter tools).
Once you have a sense of the practices, you may want to team up with a local educator and co-design a two to three-week unit of instruction, based on the planning tools provided here. Then teach the unit together and collect as much data (video, student artifacts, your versions of the tools) as possible to create your case study of ambitious teaching. This first-hand experience will be invaluable when you demonstrate this form of teaching to novices.
Within the context of methods classes, we have had success with cycles of modeling these sets of practices, then planning with novices for their attempt at the practices using their fellow learners as “students.” The novices then do a teaching simulation of about 30 minutes. We do one of these cycles for each of the three enactment sets of practices (Eliciting, Supporting On-going Changes in Thinking, Pressing for Evidence-based Explanations). To demonstrate how one models a practice, we have a full set of videos in which a teacher educator is showing novices how he planned for an anchoring event, then models for novices throughout several classes in the other three practice sets.
For teacher educators working with novices, sample goals might be to: organize a coherent pre-service experience around opportunities to learn about and rehearse the core sets of practices, create exemplars of lessons to use in pre-service settings, learn how to decompose and model various forms of ambitious teaching.
Teacher leaders, coaches, or professional developers who are organizing other teachers to advance practice
We recommend that you first get acquainted with the 4-practice framework by following a pathway similar to that described for an individual teacher. So that means going back to the top of this page and following that sequence first. You might even explore these resources in the company of local K-12 teacher leaders.
Here is an un-annotated version of steps 1-9, described much more fully above in the pathway for individual teachers (with important rationale included, please look there):
1. Begin with the Get Started page.
2. Next we recommend reading the Discourse Primer.
3. From here you could read Planning for Engagement with Important Science Ideas, then choose one or two of the teacher video cases (in the Video Gallery) to see and hear how these individuals planned units around anchoring events.
4. Explore the practices under Eliciting Students’ Ideas. Read the introduction and choose one of the cases in the Video Gallery (middle school, high school, elementary examples are there, and full units are provided) that shows this practice set.
5. Before you read about the remaining two of the four core practice sets, we recommend that you read the Models and Modeling Introduction.
6. At this point you can explore the practice set of Supporting On-going Changes in Student Thinking. Read this introductory document and watch the video segments for the teacher cases you’ve chosen.
7. Next it would be helpful to read the document on Face-to-Face Tools.
8. Finally, you can explore the Pressing for Evidence-based Explanations practices, by reading this introductory document and watching the final set of videos in the teacher case that you have chosen.
9. There are many more resources on the site for you to explore (check out the Resources page and use the selection tools Category>, Role>, Type>, Quadrant> to help filter tools).
Once you have a sense of the practices, you may want to team up with a local educator and co-design a two to three-week unit of instruction, based on the planning tools provided here. Then teach the unit together and collect as much data (video, student artifacts, your versions of the tools) as possible to create your case study of ambitious teaching. This first-hand experience will be invaluable when you model this form of pedagogy to others. Within the context of professional development and coaching, we have had success with cycles of modeling these sets of practices, and then planning with teachers for their attempt at the practices.
For a teacher leader or coach who is organizing other teachers to advance practice, sample goals might be: organize teachers for a year-long trajectory of experimentation with key practices and tools, develop ways for teachers to collect data on student learning and participation, work with teachers to identify productive variations of the core sets of practices, or help teachers develop their own goals for improvement.
This site is primarily funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through Award #1907471 and #1315995