At PFMS all science teachers use the Ambitious Science Teaching (AST) framework.  More detail about this can be found in this section of this website.  This instructional approach is very different than the science teaching that most of us have experienced in school.  Rather than the teacher delivering information to the students (via notes, worksheets, textbooks, etc...) and the students remembering and repeating the information back to the teacher, students are presented with carefully chosen phenomena that they must explain at the end of the unit.  

The phenomena is generally a simple event with a complex explanation (the changes that occur when sugar is heated for example).  Over the course of a unit, students will do a series of activities (demonstration, labs, computer simulations, etc...).  In each activity, students collect observations. With the help of the teacher, each class of students works together to determine what the observation mean.  The meaning extracted from these activities are the scientific principles / content that we want students to learn AND these principles / content will also help them explain the phenomena.  

After multiple activities have been conducted and multiple principles have been developed, the students will have enough scientific understanding that they can explain the phenomena.  The quality of their explanation of the phenomena ultimately determines their level of understanding for the unit (their grade). 

The most important factor for academic success in this class is effort.  What does effort look like?

Effort looks like:

1. Consistently sharing ideas, AND consistently listening and respecting the ideas of others

2.  Asking yourself questions:

   1. What do we know?  What does this mean?   Why does it mean this? 

   2. Finding problems with ideas.  "How can this be the explanation...the observations we made don't support it?”  "If this is true then I don't see how this can work?" 

3. Asking questions and asking for clarification. 

   1. Clarifying directions - "Mr. Bierly... what was the question again?”  "Remind me... how long should we heat the sugar?" 

   2. Clarifying observations - “Did we see bubbles?”

   3. Clarifying ideas - “You said _____, can you say that a different way?”  

4. Completing journal entries / reflections to the best of your ability. 

5. Finding Mr. Bierly outside of class to ask additional questions or to clarify something. 

6. Working to understand that learning is not always easy. In this class, you may not always understand at first but if you keep working at it you will. Especially if you keep trying. 

You should expect some homework in science class but not nightly homework.  The following would be reasons for homework:

1. A parent/guardian needs to sign a form to be returned to the teacher

2. To maintain the pacing of the class.

   1. For example, we ran out of time to do a reflection that I planned to do in class.  As a result the reflection might be assigned as homework.

3. Homework is not graded. HOWEVER, reflections/journal entries are an important part of the learning process and ultimately influence understanding, which does impact grades. 

Student-Centered

• With the help of the teacher, students generate scientific knowledge through investigations. 

• No textbook

• Notebook is for data collection and reflection not for teacher provided notes. 

Seating 

• Students sit at tables in groups of 3-5

Materials 

• The only materials that you will need is a 100-200 page composition notebook.  I'm not that picky about this but it must be just for science class as it will be stored in the classroom.  Students may take it home if they ask. 

Learning 

1. WITNESS PHENOMENA: To start a unit, students will be introduced to a carefully chosen phenomena (an event that they see in class, online, etc...)

2. MAKE AND CONFIRM OBSERVATIONS OF PHENOMENA: After making observations of the phenomena in their notebooks, observations are shared-out by students, confirmed and notebooks revised. There must be class consensus about what we observed. 

3. DISCUSS POSSIBLE EXPLANATIONS:  Once observations are shared and confirmed, student groups will speculate about the meaning of the observations and the reason for their thinking. Then those ideas are shared to the entire class to give students opportunities to consider the thoughts of others, decide if they make sense, to ask questions and/or respond to those ideas. 

4. ACTIVITIES / INVESTIGATIONS:  To generate an evidence-based explanation of the phenomena, students will need additional scientific understanding.  Each activity in the unit is designed help students generate scientific principles / concepts that they need to explain the phenomena.  Depending on the phenomena, students will do approximately 4-7 activities until they have enough scientific understanding to generate an explanation of the phenomena. 

5. EXPLAIN PHENOMENA: With their small groups students will take the scientific understandings that they developed in the activities / investigations and apply them to generate and explanation of the phenomena.   These explanations are shared with the class, discussed, refined, reworked, etc... until the observations made of the phenomena can be explained with the scientific principles / concepts that students generated in the investigations. 

1. Formative Assessment - Assessments the teacher uses to determine the level of student understanding throughout the unit.  These are used to make instructional decisions (do we need more time on this, do I need to show them something else, are they ready to move on, essentially "what adjustments do I need to make as the teacher?") These are conducted formally or informally and occur multiple times per class period.  

Examples: 

• Listening to students ideas and questions

• Listening to groups discussing ideas

• Asking specific questions to help determine student understanding. 

• A short non-graded quiz

• Asking students to draw what they are thinking

• Asking students what additional information they think they need to make sense out of something 

• Asking them to share only confusion, not understanding 

2. Summative Assessments - Assessments given to students for the purpose of determining their understanding to assign a grade

Examples

• Graded explanations (written, verbal, presentations, discussions)