Eliciting
If our main objective as a science teacher is to change students’ thinking over time, then we need to know what our students understand about the target science ideas in the first place. This set of practices—eliciting students’ ideas—is used at the beginning of a unit of instruction. This practice is designed to 1) reveal the range of resources that students use to reason about a set of science ideas (working theories, everyday experiences, language), 2) activate their prior knowledge about the topic, and 3) help you to adapt upcoming instruction, based on how students reason about the anchoring event. See Pathways page for exploring our resources.
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This case study describes how a school district intentionally designed PL to support teachers in integrating translanguaging and multimodal representations…
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Build from structured partner talk to a structured whole-class share-out
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Phenomenon- and modeling-based unit in a third-grade classroom. -
This video provides tips for eliciting students’ initial ideas, here in the context of fifth-graders thinking about why a flashlight… -
how interactive read-alouds can be geared toward supporting scientific sense-making. -
• Explanatory Element Prompts • Table Tent • Poster • PPT of Explanatory Element Menu his set of resources (described…
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Sima Faik, Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy; Alec Shrode, Chicago Academy High School; In collaboration with Michael Tompkins and Evelyn… -
Elementary / High School / Middle School / Eliciting / Planning / Tool / Professional Learning / Teacher Educator / Teacher K-12 /A model scaffold can support students in sharing and revising their thinking about a phenomenon in the world. Students represent… -
Elementary / High School / Middle School / Eliciting / Planning / Pressing / Supporting / Tool / Professional Learning / Teacher Educator / Teacher K-12 /This resource includes tools for accessing students’ funds of knowledge, critical equity questions to consider when doing so and a… -
Elementary / High School / Middle School / Eliciting / Planning / Tool / Professional Learning / Teacher Educator / Teacher K-12 /Centering justice in classrooms means evaluating the ways in which your curriculum centers justice and joy. This tool provides frameworks,… -
The Rapid Survey of Student Thinking (RSST) is a teacher tool that can be used to make sense of student… -
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Representing thinking about sound and how a singer shatters a glass. -
This video shows K-2 students working on and with their own evolving models of puzzling phenomena. -
Elementary / Eliciting / Planning / Pressing / Supporting / Video / Professional Learning / Teacher Educator / Teacher K-12 /Scientific modeling and argumentation in early elementary classrooms. -
This resource includes 8 stories from teachers in a PLC in California, which met monthly to consider how to incorporate…
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.
This site is primarily funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through Award #1907471 and #1315995
This site is primarily funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through Award #1907471 and #1315995
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