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Ambitious Science Teaching (AST)
Ambitious Science Teaching (AST)
What is Ambitious Science Teaching?
The "How" to teach STEELS
Great teaching can be learned. These resources provides a vision of ambitious science instruction for elementary, middle school and high school classrooms. Ambitious teaching deliberately aims to support students of all backgrounds to deeply understand science ideas, participate in the activities of the discipline, and solve authentic problems.
Four Core Sets of Teacher Practices
Four Core Sets of Teacher Practices
Seven Elements of Rigorous and Equitable Instruction
Teachers anchor students’ learning experiences in complex and puzzling phenomena
Students’ hypotheses, experiences, cultural knowledge and questions are treated as resources to help the class build toward Big Science Ideas
Students use ensembles of scientific practices for testing ideas they believe are important to their developing explanations and models
Teachers provide varied opportunities for students to reason things through talk
Students have access to specialized tools and routines that support their science writing , talk and participation in activities
Student thinking is made visible and subject to commentary by the classroom community
Learning experiences are selected to help students build toward cumulative and nuanced understandings of Big Science Ideas
Practice #1 Planning for engagement with important science ideas
Practice #1 Planning for engagement with important science ideas
Three planning practices for designing a unit of instruction. Important ideas in science are about the relationships between a natural phenomenon and a causal explanation that helps us understand why something in the world unfolds the way it does (phenomena are events or processes— things that happen). Studying events or process rather than “things” or abstract ideas really interests students and helps them develop deep and interconnected understandings of science concepts.
Learn more and find the tools under the Get Started Tab.
Practice #2 Eliciting student's ideas
Practice #2 Eliciting student's ideas
Our main objective as science teachers is to change students’ thinking over time, so 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. It 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. Please note that this set of practices is about more than “hooking” students or temporarily capturing their interest.
Learn more and find the tools under the Get Started Tab.
Practice #3 Supporting on-going changes in thinking
Practice #3 Supporting on-going changes in thinking
Throughout any unit of instruction, students are frequently engaged in different types of activity. For example, students might do hands-on work with materials, use computer simulations, conduct observations of phenomena, design experiments, or collect and analyze different types of data. The purpose of this set of practices is to help students develop new ideas to use in revising explanations and models for the anchoring phenomena.
Learn more and find the tools under the Get Started Tab.
Practice #4 Pressing for evidence-based explanations
Practice #4 Pressing for evidence-based explanations
This final set of practices will help students construct a final, evidence-based explanatory model for an anchoring event. The goals of this practice are:
Engage all students in authentic disciplinary discourse around using evidence to support explanations.
Hold students accountable for using multiple sources of information to construct final explanatory models for the anchoring event (this accountability of course must be supported by scaffolding and guidance from you).
Support students in using evidence to support different aspects of their explanatory models.
Learn more and find the tools under the Get Started Tab.
TIU 11 offers a series of six professional learning sessions detailing the goals and practices of Ambitious Science Teaching. Visit our professional learning webpage or our catalogue by clicking here.
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