Tier #2 Ambitious Science Teaching (AST) Session #3 AST Practice 2 - Eliciting Students’ Ideas [Half-day AM]

Instructor(s): Peney E. Wright and Eric Yoder

Description of Activity: Why do we use these particular four practices?

Our main objective as science teachers is to change students’ thinking over time, so we need to know what our students understand about the target science ideas in the first place. This set of practices—eliciting students’ ideas—is used at the beginning of a unit of instruction. It is designed to 1) reveal the range of resources that students use to reason about a set of science ideas (working theories, everyday experiences, language), 2) activate their prior knowledge about the topic, and 3) 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 session learn about the importance of Productive Student Discourse, using culturally relevant and their own words, to communicate, figure out and make sense of science concepts. 

During this session, we will focus on:

• Modeling eliciting students’ questions and ideas as well as activating prior knowledge
• Supporting students to represent their thinking publicly
• Science and Engineering Practice of developing and using models: students modeling as a technique for explaining student thinking
• Making student thinking visible

Highly Recommended: Visithttps://ambitiousscienceteaching.org/ to preview the website (Getting Started) and watch the Eliciting students’ ideas video,16;39. Also read Ambitious Science Teaching: Chapters 5-7, Appendix C

Prerequisites include:

• AST Session #1: (AST) Session #1 Introduction to Ambitious Science Teaching and Culturally Relevant Science Teaching
• AST Session #2: Practice 1 - Planning for Big Ideas

Note: Selected sessions will be recorded and made available for an asynchronous option. Asynchronous work to include pre-reading of the website and/or AST paperback, viewing AST videos, posted reflections regarding the readings and videos, and applying what is learned to participants’ contexts. Participants may join in-person, work completely asynchronously or attend as a hybrid mix. Please contact Peney at pwright@tiu11.org for complete details.