Welcome back to Ready, Set, Science! You are listening to episode 9 and this episode will be focusing on part 2 of the book Ambitious Science Teaching, “Eliciting Student Ideas”. In this part of AST, we are using all of our planning from part 1 of AST where we developed our unit of instruction with students for the first time. So let’s get to the episode!
Ok, it's finally time to take all of that planning we did in part 1 and start using it with our students. We start by accessing their ideas to see what they do or do not understand about the targeted science content. This is where the sense making really starts!
This set of practices—eliciting students’ ideas—is used at the beginning of a unit of instruction. This practice is designed to:
reveal the range of resources that students use to reason about a set of science ideas (working theories, everyday experiences, language)
activate their prior knowledge about the topic
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.
In this part, you are specifically “eliciting students’ ideas about the anchoring phenomenon”
This is more than asking the student to tell you what they think.
You need to be creative and develop what the authors call a “rich task” for students.
This task has the potential to open up the broadest range of thinking by students on the target ideas.
There are 3 practices that have been shown to be effective in helping students develop the ability to reason about the anchoring phenomenon and science content by making student thinking visible and building on it.
Practice 1: Eliciting student ideas and activating students prior knowledge
This can be accomplished through demonstrations, videos, pictures or diagrams. The most important part is to activate student prior knowledge and to help students develop their ideas about the anchoring event.
This is driven by questioning that will help students share their thinking, make predictions and share this with the group.
These questions DO NOT involve technical vocabulary and try to get students to explain WHAT is happening and HOW it is happening. These are things they can OBSERVE easily and they can also explain them.
From this conversation, students can then come up with WHY ideas about what they do not observe and are somewhat unknown.
Video example: In the video linked on the AST website, a teacher is activating student thinking about phase change and energy. She shows a demonstration of soda being distilled into something that looks like pure water. She makes her students feel comfortable and safe to share their ideas in the classroom.
Practice 2: Selecting ideas to make public
This is where students can share their ideas with the class. Practices like “hypothesizing” and “whole class consensus” are often used in this practice.
For younger students, you can offer sentence frames or sentence stems to help students form their ideas.
I almost always use post it notes for this step. What I love about post it notes is that they can be moved around especially when adding them to diagrams.
Video example: In the video, the same teacher we talked about earlier, had her students write small parts of an explanation on post it notes. Each of the post it notes was added to a chart showing a diagram of the soda distillation demonstration. This made the students’ thinking visible and public. It not only helped the students understand each other, but it also showed the teacher where the students were in their understanding of the concept.
Practice 3: Adapting further instruction
Here teachers are listening to the student answers and specifically listening to particle understanding, prior experiences and for language that students use to explain their ideas.
This helps teachers understand where the students are and gives us the tools we need to move their thinking forward.
Our teacher from the example video above used the written explanations/ideas and conversations with her students to access their thinking. She uses these ideas and she refers back to them during the entire unit. One great thing she does is take the students' ideas and write them as hypotheses asking the students to take a stand on one of the hypotheses as an explanation for the phenomena they have observed. This is especially helpful for younger students who do not have the experience with forming science ideas.
Reminders:
This part of AST only works if the teacher has first gone through part 1, planning for engagement. Listen to episode 8 for more details about that!
This part is messy. It will not be perfect because it is based on the students’ thoughts and ideas. You must be flexible in order to make a real impact on students and to help them make sense of the phenomena.
Resources:
Well that is all for this episode and for part 2 of AST. Remember that you can find all of the resources that I mentioned in the show notes and on my website. 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 time!
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