Presentations on Anchoring events and Modeling

May 21, 2017

These are presentations in which the ideas of anchoring events and modeling are featured. We’ve broken the presentations down into more view-able segments. In each, there are up-to-date examples of both anchoring events—from kindergarten to AP chemistry—and modeling from all grade levels. The content of the presentations adds to what you’ll find in written documents and other videos on this site. And again, we thank all our teacher partners for furnishing these examples for the AST community.

Introduction to anchoring events

What all good anchoring events have in common is that they motivate students to try and explain what is going on. These explanations are elaborated and evidence-based accounts—ones that require young learners to draw upon a wide range of science concepts and to engage in multiple investigations in order to construct narratives and representations for the target phenomenon. The process of scientific modeling is a companion disciplinary practice to explanation. Modeling has many benefits for learning, but its most powerful feature is that it makes student thinking more visible, and in different ways than the written or spoken word.

How to contextualize anchoring events to support challenge and learning

Planning units using anchoring events: The process

What are scientific models? What kinds of models are good for K-12 modeling?

How students can model events and process over the course of a unit

Revising models and allowing students to show what they know

A Teacher's Story

Middle/High School Teacher Story:

I am an instructional coach in a middle school, but facilitating High School science curriculum work in my district. I am a former HS science teacher and have been an instructional coach for the last five. Our high school science curriculum needed updating to more closely align with the NGSS–particularly to incorporate the SEPs and CCCs. We have started with re-designing the curriculum for our two core courses (required by all students for graduation), Earth science and biology.

Our district has strong science teachers who have a deep knowledge of their content, they just needed to update their instructional pedagogy and practices. After reviewing some already created resources, the teachers felt strongly that they wanted to continue to create their own. To meet them in the middle, we began working with Melissa Braaten on AST, so that we could shift pedagogy to include phenomena, discourse, modeling, etc. We continued to emphasize the importance of discourse and modeling so that all students could participate in the learning.

Teachers piloted an AST-designed unit in the spring and their work was fantastic. Teachers shared student modeling posters, artifacts, assessment data, etc. Several teachers reported that they finally understood how to get all students to participate in discussion. Others reported that students performed better on the assessment because they had tied all of their learning back to the phenomenon. Teachers also reported that their teaching didn’t feel so disjointed with isolated labs/learning activities–that everything had a purpose related to the phenomenon.

Suggestions

I highly recommend that teachers take a leap of faith and dive into piloting/trying this methodology. Every day we ask students to be uncomfortable in order to learn, as teachers, we need to model this behavior! AST benefits all students and leads to better learning outcomes for all!

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