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Attending to students’ ideas

Bethany attends to students’ ideas in several ways. First she plans daily activities based on what will help students build a scientific explanation. She has a general sense of the activities that fit with the big idea but is open to rearranging, adding, or subtracting activities based on what she hears students reasoning with or only partially reasoning with each day. Her “warm-ups” are responses to what she heard the previous day.  She also plans each day by listing a set of probing questions to ask students and ideas she will be listening for. Here is an example of her plan for the first day of the unit:

Phase of Unit

Day

Goals/Purpose

In Class Activities/Conversations

Student Work

Eliciting Student’s Ideas

One: The Tanker
  • To get students’ ideas on the table about the relationships between temperature, volume and pressure in gases. 
  • To hear their everyday language about temperature, phases and pressures. 
  • To hear any preconceptions about pressure and forces.

Students will observe video clip and picture of crushing tanker in order to elicit their ideas about the relationships between temperature, pressure and volume in gases. 

** Spoken probing questions:

  • What is inside the tanker?
  • Draw the molecules, show their actions. 
  • How much stuff is in the tanker?
  • Why does it collapse (show with arrows)
  • What do you mean by “suck?”

Individual brainstorm about what/why/how the tanker is collapsing.
Group poster explaining their ideas about what’s happening to the tanker.

** Expect to see/hear: 
Students should be talking about molecules, and should make connection temperature and speed of molecules.  They should also talk about molecules spreading out as they heat up.  Students should use arrows of varying lengths to represent speeds of molecules.  They may or may not start using arrows to represent air pressure on the outside of the tanker.  They might talk about the walls of the tanker being “sucked” in.

 

 

In conversations with students Bethany assumes there is more than one right way to assemble an explanation. She follows students’ lines of thinking and presses students to put all of their ideas on the table so she can fully understand not just what but how students are reasoning with the explanation. Most often you will hear Bethany asking students 5 why questions for every 2 word response they give. Once she understands students’ explanations she asks them to wrestle with a new idea or to figure out how to piece together 2 different ideas students in a group raised. One indicator that students are constructing an explanation that makes sense to them is that each poster students develop looks slightly different, even at the end of the unit. Not only does Bethany work on students’ ideas but she supports students in working on their own ideas by having them constantly track their ideas on a scientific model.

Monitoring and re-teaching ideas
• Teacher starts by presenting information, then monitors language students use to see if students are developing “correct” conceptions (whether students “get it” or not).
• Teacher engages in 1-on-1 tutoring or uses IRE in whole class conversations to present more correct conceptions to students (perhaps using a different modality).

Eliciting students’ initial & unfolding understandings
• Teacher elicits students’ initial and on-going hypotheses, questions, or conceptual frameworks about a scientific idea.

Referencing students’ ideas & adapts instruction
• Teacher elicits students’ initial conceptions of a scientific idea by posing a rich open-ended task or puzzling event related to the big idea of the unit.
• Teacher listens for partial understandings as well as alternative conceptions (without presuming students need to precisely replicate the teacher’s line of thinking). 
• Teacher uses students’ language and partial understandings as building blocks to shape the direction of classroom conversations. Teachers engineer productive classroom conversations or pursue students’ lines of thinking by weaving students’ lines of reasoning together with scientifically coherent ideas across multiple lessons.