Supporting Student Sense-making in STEELS

Prerequisite: STEELS Immersive Experience, ENGINE 3D STEELS Educators Community of Practice (CoP), OR district PD Intro to STEELS session. 
Preferred Prerequisites: STEELS Special Topics A & B 

All Standards All Students
Learning experiences for students, from PreK through high school must actively engage students in the scientific practices to deepen their understanding of the core ideas in the sciences. These investigations must engage students with questions about the world and how scientists have investigated and answered questions. 
In Pennsylvania schools, it is our expectation that all students have experiences within all areas of science, which include the Physical Sciences (Chemistry and Physics), Life Sciences (including Biology and Environmental Literacy and Sustainability) and Earth and Space Science.​ 

PDE: Instruction > Elementary and Secondary Education > Curriculum > Science 

Ambitious Science Teaching (AST)
Shifting science pedagogy towards that of an Ambitious Science Teacher “works with students’ ideas” over time. What would you experience in classrooms where ambitious teaching was the focus? You would see and hear: 
- Teachers anchoring their instruction in complex and puzzling phenomena that are meaningful and relevant to learners. Teachers design science experiences so that science aims for justice and creates space for joy. 
- Students engaging in multiple rounds of creating and revising scientific models, explanations, and evidence-based arguments, expanding ideas over time. 
- Teachers use a variety of discourse strategies with students to get them to think deeply and respond to each other’s thinking about phenomena, ideas, and multiple perspectives. 
- Students prompt each other to engage in sense-making talk during investigations and other activities because students are working to learn from each other’s perspectives. 
- Students’ ideas being represented publicly and worked on by the class as a collective science learning community. 
- Teachers use a variety of discourse strategies to support students in responding to one another’s thinking, build collaborative explanations, and broadly address issues of power and positionality in the classroom and science. 
- Students using evidence to advocate for justice-centered uses of science based on multiple perspectives, ideas, and questions that have broadened over time.

- Students reflect on how they learned and how they broadened what it means to participate in science together. 
This professional learning will focus on AST’s Practice #3 Supporting Ongoing Sense-making. Throughout any unit of instruction, students are frequently engaged in different types of activities. 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. Research on learning shows that the types of sense-making talk orchestrated by the teacher prompt productive puzzlement, reasoning, and learning by students. This set of teaching practices aims to help students develop new ideas and perspectives to revise explanations and models and ultimately expand what it means 
to participate in science. By considering multiple perspectives and different ways of doing science together, teachers and students make sense of science ideas and broaden how science is done. Teachers use a variety of discourse strategies to support students in responding to one another’s thinking and build collaborative explanations. 

Students will strengthen their ability to support their thinking with reliable, valid and verified evidence in support of converging to the target disciplinary core idea. 

In this professional learning, you will walk away with a toolkit of resources to manage, facilitate and challenge students to become better at sustained Academic Productive Discourse for all learners.