Discourse strategy: Making sense of material activity

This discourse tool helps you design conversations with students that allow them to connect various kinds of activity with the big idea. By activity, we mean anything from a teacher-led demonstration to student controlled studies.

The three goals of this discourse:

1. To ensure students understand why the activity makes sense to do at this point in the unit (answers students’ questions “Why are we doing this? What gaps does this help me fill?”)
2. To help students bridge the activity with a larger scientific idea (answers the question “What in the natural world does this activity help me understand, and how?”) Students should be able to explain this activity in terms of some scientific idea.
3. To support the development of students’ academic language, using the activity as a context. One aspect of academic language support is helping students understand the conventions or symbolism used to represent the phenomena (typically in written or drawn form), as well as vocabulary and science-specific rhetoric.

Download discourse tool for Making Sense of Material Activity

Download "express" version of discourse tool for Making Sense of Material Activity

If you would like to see examples of this discourse in action, you can go to the following case pages:

• Janet teaching about fungi to middle school students
• Melissa teaching about forces and motion to middle school students
• Brian teaching the physics of sound to high school students
• Bethany teaching about the Gas Laws to high school students

 

 

 

Tool Systems to Support Progress toward Expert-Like Teaching by Early Career Science Educators 2008-2013 Discovery K-12 Grant National Science Foundation No. DRL-0822016