Eliciting

The second set of AST practices is a collection of teaching practices focused on a commitment to eliciting students’ contributions. Students are not blank slates; they bring ideas, language, experiences, and connections into science learning experiences. Treating student contributions as important resources is central to justice-centered ambitious science teaching because it pushes back against deficit narratives. To support students in expanding their thinking over time, we need to know what they understand about the phenomenon in the first place. This set of practices—eliciting students’ ideas—is used at the beginning of a unit of instruction to help students reflect on relevant experiences, stories, identities, knowledge, theories, and language and help the teacher adapt upcoming instruction based on students’ contributions. Teachers continue to elicit and consider students’ contributions throughout a unit.

Suggested starting places include:

Hosun Kang Promoting Justice and Equity

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Eliciting Ideas & Expansive Science

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Eliciting overview

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Ambitious Teaching—An overview

In this video we illustrate what Ambitious Teaching looks like in classrooms ranging from high school to kindergarten. The practices were developed through collaborations between teachers and researchers, and they are continually evolving as we learn more about how they work with young learners. There are several themes that you’ll see in all examples, such as a focus on puzzling and complex phenomena, opportunities to make sense through talk, making thinking visible, attending to who is participating, using various forms of scaffolding and tools, and much more.

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“So the idea of ambitious science teaching generally as a construct in a framework is really helpful because it gives a name to really powerful instruction that I think a lot of teachers do pieces of, or maybe they do a lot of. But when you give something a name, it then helps to bring it into life in a way that they can talk to other people about the work.”

– Teacher Educator

This site is primarily funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through Award #1907471 and #1315995