Welcome back to Ready, Set, Science! You are listening to episode 8 and this episode will be focusing on part 1 of the book Ambitious Science Teaching, “Planning for Engagement”. I hope you are ready to dive into this fantastic book and explore the methods within it. Ok let’s get started!

• What is ambitious science teaching?

  • The authors define ambitious science teaching as a teaching approach that focuses on “working with student ideas over time.” This includes 7 important practices.

    • Teachers anchoring their instruction in complex and puzzling natural events

    • Students engaging in multiple rounds of creating and revising scientific models, explanations and evidence-based arguments

    • Teachers using a variety of discourse strategies with students to get them to think deeply and to respond to each other’s thinking

    • Students prompting each other to engage in sense-making talk during investigations and other activities

    • Students’ ideas being represented publicly and worked on by the class

    • Teachers using specialized tools and routines to support students who are not willing or able to participate without help

    • Students speaking up about what information or experiences they need to move their thinking forward

  • Resources:

    • Overview Video: https://vimeo.com/106398654 

• Part 1: Chapters 1-4: “Planning for Engagement with Important Science Ideas”

  • Students are asked to study events or processes not topics or things.

  • Three practices

    • Unpacking the standards/curriculum

      • Often teachers start with a topic an​d then try to figure out how to teach that topic. In AST, we are asked to first focus on the standards and where your topic falls in those standards. This can be hard because you may find out that a topic you have been focusing on doesn't really fit the standards. Now that doesn’t mean that you shouldn't teach that topic but it does mean that there are probably more important things to focus on.

        • PA Science Teachers: The new STEELS standards are very different from the old standards that we have been using. PA has not updated their science standards since 2002 (I was a freshman in college - 2002 was a long time ago). I think we are going to find out that some of the topics we have we have been focusing on do not really fit anywhere.

      • How to do it:

1. Find your state standards or use the NGSS standards.

2. Choose a broad topic like homeostasis, forces in motion or cellular respiration. I always start with my favorite topic because it helps me create a template.

3. Look into your standards at the appropriate grade level that you are teaching and try to find 4-5 standards that fit with that topic. Write each of the standards on a post it note. 

4. Looking back at your curriculum, find 4-5 big ideas that fit with the standards you selected in step 3.

5. You will select the big ideas that have the most “explanatory power” from this set (maybe 3). This means that these ideas have the biggest range and can help to explain and connect a lot of different concepts.

• Identifying the anchoring phenomena and its explanation

1. These are selected from the 3 ideas with the most explanatory power form step 5 above.

2. This is a complex or puzzle event or idea that you will continue to return to throughout your unit. The point of the unit is for students to identify the anchoring phenomena and its explanation.

3. The explanation should pull together a large number of science ideas. 

4. The students should be able to explain something that does happen in nature, even if it takes a long time to happen.

5. Coming up with an anchoring phenomena takes a lot of creativity and can take time to develop. It is best to have a large group of teachers working on this at the same time.

6. Once the anchoring phenomena is chosen, then teachers will write out the explanation for how it happens. This will be elaborated and involves all of the science that students will understand in order to explain it.

• Organizing a sequence of learning experiences

1. The final planning practice is to outline the learning experiences that students will go through in order to achieve the learning goals. These are based on the explanation of the phenomena.

2. Teachers should first color code their explanation giving each science idea a different color.

3. They will then list out the learning experiences (readings, labs, videos, activities) for the unit and attach them to one of the color coded science ideas. They should only attached to one idea and each idea should have at least one learning experience attached to it.

4. Now it is time to plan the order for the unit. Take the list of learning experiences and break them into beginning, middle and end of the unit based on the students prior knowledge and what they will need to get out of the experiences. 

   • Experiences in the first third are more familiar to students and a usually more concrete ideas.

   • Experiences in the last third are usually more abstract and involve putting science ideas together to draw conclusions or form ideas.

   • If you are using story building for your units, the story will follow the sequence of beginning, middle and end as well.

5. While planning it is important to remember the other three parts of ambitious science teaching, which outline the learning and teaching in the unit.

   • Part 1 - Eliciting student ideas is where the phenomena is introduced and the students are asked to share what they think is happening.

   • Part 2 - Supporting changes in student thinking is the middle part of the unit and is where the bulk of the work is done. As the students work through the learning experiences, they are building on their prior knowledge and learning new science concepts to help them make sense of what is happening in the phenomena. Some of this will be teacher driven instruction/activities but it can also come from student ideas/discussions. 

   • Part 3 - Pressing for evidence based explanations is the final part of the unit. This is where the students are encouraged to use the new scientific ideas they have learned and come up with their own explanation for the phenomena. There are a variety of explanations and models that can be produced by the students at this stage. 

• I highly recommend that you watch the videos linked in the show notes to ​​get a better understanding of the steps in part 1 of Ambitious Science Teaching. It is a lot to think about and it can feel overwhelming but remember that doing these steps with a group of teachers is always the best option.

• Resources:

  • Overview Video: https://vimeo.com/104466081 

Well that is all for this episode and for part 1 of AST. Remember that you can find all of the resources that I mentioned in the show notes and on my website. I made a AST bundle with templates and examples that you can use to work through the book. If you are working through the process of AST, head over to instagram and let me know how it is going. These processes are hard but worth it and I am here to help you in any way that I can. See you next week for part 2, “Eliciting Student Ideas''!

Thanks for listening!

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