Pressing

This final set of AST practices helps students synthesize ideas at key points during the unit and at the end of the unit to help students construct an evidence-based explanatory model for the phenomenon and, when relevant, work to apply explanations to problem-solving. An important goal of this practice is to connect students’ explanatory models with social, political, cultural, and community-based contexts for the phenomenon.

This complex set of teaching practices includes:

Engaging students in authentic disciplinary discourse around using evidence to support explanations
Holding students accountable for using multiple sources of information to construct explanatory models (with scaffolding and guidance from the teacher).
Engaging students in reflecting on how their perspectives, ideas, and questions broadened over time and if/how they were able to disrupt ways the culture of white supremacy is often replicated in science and science education.

Suggested starting places include:

Pressing for evidence-based explanations

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Stakeholders Meeting video

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CER Sentence Starters

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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