Fumia_Week5

Models help the teacher make changes going forward because they can recognize student thinking. One idea I want to tyr going forward and put into my practice is providing a checklist that has ideas in which my students incorporate in their final project. This will gives students reassurance of what they need in the end. Also provides a great way to scaffold. The readings reminded me that students always need to be visible in the classroom reminding me that we cannot become robots.

One idea I found interesting was making every kid in the group making the model draw in a different color - keeps them in check and the thinking going. This really engages those kids who usually do not get involved. Allowing and providing an idea rather than worrying so much about what it looks like. This goes along with the last idea I would like to try in my classroom. Much of what we learn happens at a level where we can not see it with our naked eye. It is my job to help my students to start thinking about these processes and models at the level in which they actually occur. That is the only way they will become scientist and acquire this special skill of processing and synthesizing information. 

Fumia_Week 6

I could not resonate any more with the articles from this week. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about how important data and explanations are for our students. I have tried very hard this year to focus on having my students always explain their "evidence." I taught high school biology this past summer at Pearl Cohn and I was very surprised when my junior students struggled so much with analyzing data and reading graphs/charts. Something Elyssa and I noticed together was what our students deemed "reliable." It was interesting reading these articles and thinking back to that realization and also seeing Elyssa noticed this as well.
Going forward I having already started to focus in on making sure students use evidence for all the aspects of their explanation. Thus, I need to make sure I am always holding them accountable to use "reliable" sources. this directly comes back to me as the teacher because i need to make sure I model and explicitly describe what this means. Throughout the articles I really enjoyed the scaffolding questions they gave as examples. It aligned with my belief that scaffolding is extremely important in teaching this skill, I have to make it a norm that we use evidence for every claim we make (that is because I am teaching them to think and do like scientists).

Harris - Week 6

I loved that this week’s articles focused on both the definitions of data and explanation as well as how to scaffold their use for students. Whether we were collecting first-hand data or analyzing second-hand data, a large undertaking this year has been explaining to my students the difference between credible and unreliable sources. Having grown up in the age of Google, Wikipedia, and Facebook, many of them are inclined to believe that any source they find online is reliable. I have shown them several methods of source-bias-analysis such as filtering for .edu urls, always looking for a published author, and identifying who, if anyone, has funded the study. However, I still struggle to adequately communicate the identifiable features of a truly credible source given the volume of information available online. 

I think that starting with clear definitions of “claim,” “evidence,” and “explanation,” as provided in these readings will help my students with both their ideas and those of others. I know from my point of view, these readings have given me a more comprehensive understanding that I can use to better explain these concepts to my students. The last unit of the year for my freshman Environmental Science class is a PBL on recycling. As this unit is going to need to draw on first- and second-hand data I will try to make these distinctions for my students in the time remaining. However, even more so, looking towards next year I will work to introduce these concepts early on so that they can be applied and grown throughout the year. I think that differentiating between claim and evidence will be especially useful as most of what students read online falls under the banner of claims that are either insufficiently supported by data or simply not back by data at all. Hopefully, teaching them to be more critical in their own speaking, writing, and thinking will help them become more critical of the unsubstantiated opinions around them.

Dawkins_wk 6

Overview:

• This is the last of four practice sets that make up the framework for ambitious science teaching.
• First practice:  you unpacked your curriculum to identify “big ideas,” then created an anchoring event that students could develop an explanation for.  Identifying the big ideas is the most important part of planning.  However, if the big ideas are identified the teacher is able to quickly redirect the lesson when required.  
• Second practice:  you elicited students’ ideas, partial understandings, and background experience that were relevant to the anchoring event and other target science ideas of the unit.  
• Then, throughout the middle of the unit you used repeated rounds of the third practice, which was helping students change their thinking by making sense of activities, to piece together component ideas for the underlying explanatory model.
• This final set of practices-pressing for evidence-based explanations-designed to help students rally different kinds of evidence in support of their culminating explanations.

The two practices involved are:  

Constructing and evaluating claims

Drawing final ideas together in models and explanations

Goals

• Support students in using evidence to account for different aspects of their explanatory model.
• Hold students accountable for using multiple sources of information to construct final explanatory models for the anchoring event.
• Engage all students in authentic disciplinary discourse around constructing and defending explanations.

When do you use these practices?

• Sequence happens approximately about two days left in a unit of instruction.  
• The talk about evidence should be used through out the unit when you are trying to get students to support claims they are making.  
• A couple of days should be open after these practices is to all students to apply the explanatory models to events or processes been to target of study.

How to enact these practices

Constructing and evaluating final claims

• Teacher asks students to prepare to defend one key aspect of there explanatory model
• Relevant evident from a public record such as a summary
• Called a claim.

Claim is a statement about some event, process, or relationship in the natural world that you believe to be true.

• Is not simply a statement about trends in data.
• Claim can be thought of a small part of a larger explanation

Helping students talk about evidence:  A guide for science teachers

The gist of this article is aimed at helping students talk about evidence.  It explains in detail the explanation of a claim.  

I like that the author provides examples of how evidence and explanation should be explained in the classroom.  The author does a great job with providing examples and relating these examples to real scenarios.  

Helping students engage in conversations about claims, evidence, and explanations can be challenging.  This article reminds us of how important it is to allow our students to develop a hypothesis. 

Lopez - Pressing for Evidence - W6

In Pressing for Evidence-Based Explanations, Ambitious Science Teaching summarizes the steps and importance of closing out a unit with students capable of providing explanations for the phenomenon and anchoring event with evidence for their causal models. It also provides ideas for scaffolding to help all students learn the skill and be capable of providing at least one defense of a single aspect of their explanatory model, and eventually be able to put together multiple claims to give evidence-based reasoning for the entire phenomenon.

Helping Students Work with Evidence is a guide for teachers to first and foremost, understand what counts as evidence, claims, or explanations so they can help support students in forming them. It also defines what a teacher can consider as counting in the scientific community as a claim and explanation, and the difference between data and evidence.

I found these articles to be most helpful in giving straightforward structures and scaffolds for teachers to support student's claims and explanations of their models and evidence and push them further in making connections between activities that have been completed as part of the unit and using them to create claims that pass muster in the scientific community. I liked the scaffolding questions that they suggested and reading about some of the challenges that students will most likely face when learning how to use evidence to explain their causal evidence. I know that my students are familiar with using evidence to support their answers, but I think that this article helps to define the difference between everyday explanations and scientific explanations. Also, as a non-scientist, I really appreciated that the second reading helped support teachers in understanding how to define claims and evidence and breaking down the different ways teachers can help students get there through different types of phenomenon. I think this will be very helpful for me in facilitating discussion and scaffolding and back pocket questions.

Attig- Pressing for Student Based Explanations

I was incredibly excited for this weeks readings because I feel like this is the hardest thing to get kids to do. I have given many assignments where students were required to explain something. And 90% of the time I have taken off points because either they simply didn’t include an explanation or their explanation completely missed the mark. I especially enjoyed the templates and teacher sentence starters that AST uses for students who don’t provide in depth explanations. For example, I have had students explain how they balanced a particular reaction. Many could not understand why simply showing their work wasn’t enough. I could not get them to see that the work didn’t show the full picture of a balanced chemical reaction. It doesn’t explain the conservation of mass, or moles, or the particular skill set that comes with balancing chemical reactions. So needless to say I appreciated how to explain to kids why their explanation isn’t adequate while still pressing them for more. This type of feedback provides kids with where they missed the mark, as well as future steps to take. 

            I also appreciated these articles because of how they outline teaching kids how to make a scientific explanation. Telling a kid to “explain what is happening here” without scaffolding or providing the support necessary. I loved how the articles also made a distinction between describing phenomena and explaining phenomena. Often time I have found myself believing that students knew what they were talking about by simply describing what is happening. However, anyone can describe what is happening; it takes a certain skill set to explain. Knowing the difference between the two not only makes it easier to help my students, but also makes it much more equitable for my students. 

            My last question/comment is how do we make this practice of pressing for scientific explanations more equitable for our EL students? I know some of mine will use pictures and a couple of words, but that doesn’t provide evidence of real understanding. Should a separate rubric be used for EL students? What is the most equitable thing for us to do in these situations? 

Portillo Week 6

Both of the articles were concerned with eliciting evidence based explanations from students.

These articles stress the importance of pressing for evidence-based explanations and helping students talk about evidence. Both of these themes were influential in my thinking this week.



 The article about pressing for evidence gives several helpful examples on how to do this, by either asking for an activity or the reasoning. While it is simple, it gets the students to do the thinking rather than the teacher doing the thinking for them. Other questions can be as simple as “How do you know?” or “What else?” It also touches on the importance of modeling and writing gapless explanations. These are both activities we have touched on in class, which we know are very important to forming understandings. It is important that students are able to make sense of the information in their own way in order to transfer it to a working understanding of a topic. We also need to focus on differentiating the difference between a claim and an explanation. A claim simply states what a student believes to be true, while an explanation also gives evidence as to why the student thinks that. In creating an explanation, our students need to be able to not just say that the claim is supported by the data, but be able to explain why it is an explanation. The article also provides some sentence stems for the students who may have trouble beginning them on their own.



These practices are some that we need to be practicing constantly. Our students will struggle without constant reinforcement. As I begin to plan for next year, I will think about implementing plenty of opportunities to students to create evidence based explanations based on data.