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.

Neely_Wk6

http://ambitiousscienceteaching.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Primer-Pressing-for-Explanations.pdf

·       At the end of the unit as students are practicing what they have learned is when you can really press “for evidence-based explanation,” with “constructing and evaluating claims… (and) drawing final ideas together in models and explanations.”

·       The first step is to develop a claim, doing this with a smaller focus works better earlier on than having it on the unit topic(s) as a whole

o   (CER Claim, Evidence, and Reasoning).Sets of instructions should have students describe what they are supporting, what evidence is being used to do so and then how that evidence fits the claim.

·       Once students have developed a strong CRE they should create a model (connecting the cause and effect) with a supporting explanation.

http://ambitiousscienceteaching.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Claims-and-Evidence.pdf

This article was for teachers to better understand the process of using CER in the class.  It started with more of an explanation on the word claim with if having more meaning in the classroom than it might in everyday life.  After this evidence is defined with its use in the reason portion explain.  I like the article in its use of examples and providing a template of CER with (1. “Our claim… 2. If this claim is true… 3. Here is the reason I’d expect this… 4. If our claim was not true… 5. There may be other explanations….).”

A theme with this class has been developing students to think like scientist.  Using the CER model seems to be the popular method to achieve this goal currently. The second article does well at defining CER as the first describes its regular application to units with a note on it being embedded throughout the unit.  For my questions of use I am again thinking about the EOC this week.  My students in Biology will be tested on the 26^th and we just finished up our last unit.  Going into this next week I am thinking I would like to create models for the units we have gone through.  Then taking old EOC questions I would like to see students make a claim for the answer and back it up with outside evidence they have seen before and give their reason for the answer choice and possible the reason that the other choices are not correct.    

Maskan - Evidence Based Explanations W6

This week’s readings included pressing for evidence-based explanations and helping students talk about evidence. The practices include creating and evaluating claims as well as finalizing student models and explanations. Students can start by supporting their model by using evidence to make a claim for a relevant and credible source. A claim will have to explain a part of a larger explanation, which is different than providing descriptions of a phenomenon. Instead, students will have to explain how the unobservable can cause observable events. Students can ease into the practice of explanations by supporting a specific claim rather than supporting their entire model. Creating a dialogue with students that pushes them to evaluate their reasoning and thinking will have students delve into what counts as evidence and how they can better support and solidify their statements through the use of data (collected by the student or second-hand). 

Students will bring together their ideas and create a final model and a gapless explanation. The model can be in words and drawings, which show how observations along with reasoning and information from sources resulted in their claims. In order to do all the practices above, I plan on using a guide on the language needed in the explanation, a model template that students can illustrate their thinking, using terms before, during, and after when explaining a phenomena, as well as checklists. By scaffolding for students, I can ensure that they will create a product that aligns with the rubric and their model provides an accurate explanation that aligns with science talk in the field. Over time I plan to reduce the amount of scaffolding once students are comfortable with creating models, in order for students to think and abide by a rubric that is driven by ownership of their work. Of course this will take practice, but eventually with the correct learning environment that includes student participation, norms that include science language, revision, and collaboration will eventually create a place where students create articulate explanations by using scientific practices and social skills to further their understanding of science. 

One goal of mine is to make sure my students are adept at researching credible sources (and understand how data can be skewed). This is a concern of mine since social media can distort the truth and ensue worry and chaos among society (ex. parents who share anti-vaccine articles on Facebook and create doubt in medicine with other friends). My school has limited laptops for use with students, so how can I provide means for students to find credible data? 

Attig- Supporting Ongoing Changes in Student Thinking

I personally loved the face to face tools article simply because of how practical it is. I especially loved the “gotta have” checklist. I have done this with my students before and they personally appreciate it because not only is it a great way for them to guide their own thinking. It can be very difficult for kiddos to talk about something they don’t feel they are experts on. Students (like all people) love to be right. So they the often are reluctant due to ambiguity. I think that when you give students a “gotta have” checklist it gets rid of some of this ambiguity. It also keeps some kids who overwrite or underwrite from doing this. Some kids overwrite because of fear of not having enough information while others won’t write enough simply due to not knowing the vast nature of what they are writing about.

I also loved this article due to the add, revise, and question sentence scaffolds. I have learned over the duration of this course how important sentence scaffolds are as it is how we teach students what science talk looks and sounds like. I cannot tell you how many times I have let students fumble around for the wording when answering a question. They are truly trying to use and understand the language but if we don’t show them how they are never going to get it.

This also is an equitable practice. By doing this you are providing the words for english language learners. This not only saves them time so they can focus on the actual models and less on the english, but it also provides them an opportunity to understand how to use scientific language. This also creates an opportunity for kids who may not have the resources to become scientifically literate, a chance to understand and grapple with language of scientists. One of the biggest issues with socio-economically disadvantaged kids is that they are less likely to look for resources. I don’t think this has anything to do with these kids being lazy. These kids don’t know where or how to find resources. They didn’t have parents who took them to the library when they were younger. They don’t have time to do research on things that interest them. They never have had someone explain natural phenomena to them. Kids shouldn’t be punished or put at a disadvantage because of something that they simply don’t know. We have to teach them!     

Lopez - Week 5 - Supporting Ongoing Changes in Student Thinking

In Making Changes Visible and Supporting Changes in Student Thinking from Ambitious Science Teaching, best practices for engaging student-led thinking and reasoning around important science ideas are presented for teachers to use in classroom instruction. In Making Changes Visible, teachers are presented with a "toolkit" for strategies that teachers can use with students for students to construct and represent their own thinking in explaining science ideas. In Supporting Changes, the goals are for students to understand why the activity relates to the current content, to be able to connect the activity with a larger science concept, and the activity to provide context for the student to develop scientific knowledge.


In Making Changes Visible, I really appreciated the language and framing they suggested for presenting to students how to model scientific ideas. With fifth graders, my students often get stuck in the small details of drawing well or writing neatly and don't get to through the entire modeling. I think framing that Science models are intended to present an idea rather than look a certain way from the first day, will help students become better at modeling and drawing out their thinking. I especially want to use the Before, During, and After technique with my students. I also want to incorporate the sentence frames as tools for students writing, as well as when they verbally discuss their ideas with each other in small groups or whole class.

One aspect that I found really helpful from Supporting Changes in Student Thinking is the lists of back-pocket questions that they gave based on typical ideas and statements that students may share. I particularly liked the idea of "This is a question I want to leave you with..." I think this would be a great catalyst for student discussion and engagement.

Robison - Reading Response 6

The final set of practices for ambitious science teachers is to press your students for evidence-based explanations within the last couple of days of the unit. After reading both articles, I realized this is something I do not do very often with my students. Yes, I hold them accountable for understanding the learning targets that we are trying to reach through assessments. However, I do not make them provide their own evidence for the why behind an event. Usually, I am the one telling them the why, but by making them responsible for providing evidence it is taking work off of me and putting it onto the students. It might be too late to do much work with this practice during this school year, but I believe if I get a head start on this at the beginning of next year my students will get used to having to provide me with evidence-based explanations for the modeling that we do in class.

The biggest problem I see with this is students getting in the habit of simply copying what their source tells them. I will need to ensure that my students have plenty of in-class activities and experiences that they can pull from to prevent them from looking up every answer online and rearranging a few words. I loved the idea from the Teaching Practice Set article about having an "explanation checklist" to keep students on track and to ensure that they do not leave anything out of their model. I also loved the idea of having a group "ambassador" to listen to other group's explanations and bring that information back to their group. This helps all of the students hear more examples and explanations, and it forces them to put these things into their own words in order to explain things to their peers.

For my field experience, I am observing another chemistry teacher’s class during my planning periods. Last week he started a new unit and did a really great job with this. It was neat to see him start by using actual scientific data to test a claim and then model with his students, just like the second reading shows. I look forward to implementing this practice more during the next school year!

Dawkins Week 5

Teaching practice set:  Supporting on-going changes in student thinking

The gist of this article as the title suggests describes and explains teacher practices that can used to support student thinking.  There are ideal ways to support the above.  However, many teachers are not utilizing these procedures.  

Overview

• Throughout a unit of instruction, students are frequently engaged in different types of activity.
• hands-on work, computer simulations, conduct observations, collect and analyze different types of data
• Students enjoy these activities (ideally).
• Unfortunately, the way activities are structured in many classrooms is far from ideal.
• Students typically follow rote procedures.
• They rarely asked conceptual underpinnings of the activity, and there are no attempts to link the activity with a larger phenomenon or set of science ideas.
• Students typically follow rote procedures.
• They are rarely asked to complete conceptual underpinnings of the activity.
• No attempts to link the activity with larger phenomenon or set of science ideas.

Why is this a problem?

• Research has shown that just exposure to hands-on activity does not lead to student understanding.
• Sense making talk, orchestrated by the teacher, prompts productive puzzlement, reasoning, and learning.  

This handout provide a structure for thinking about the purposeful design of activity and for the critical forms of sense making talk that needs to be integrated with activity.

The 3 practices that make up this set are:

• Introducing ideas to reason with
• Engaging with data or observations
• Using knowledge to revise models or explanations

The purpose of activity is to help students develop new ideas to use in revising their explanatory models for the anchoring phenomena.  

If the activity does not further this goal then it should be reconstructed or discarded.

Critique

• I like the goal and activity examples given by the author.
• I like that the provides detailed examples of modeling.
• The references were useful.  However, the article seemed wordy.
• I like that the author reminds teacher that the activities should be purposeful and just something selected from the curriculum.  

Face-to-Face Tools:  Making Changes in Student Thinking Visible Over Time

Gist:

This article explains the purpose of models.  It provides the “how to” create an effective model.   

Face-toFace Tools:  Making Changes in Student Thinking Visible Over Time

• Models are made to the public representations.
• There are several reasons for this:  models are a way to make thinking visible.  For example, 6th graders modeled the transmission of sound from a musical instrument to the human ear.  I like this example; because it relates to the video that we watch during class.  I know that students will like this example.  
• As ideas became visible, their peers and the teacher used sticky-notes to suggest how they might add to their model, revise other parts, and test some of the relationships built into their model.  Sticky notes are not permanent.  As a result, students are comfortable with writing their ideas on these small pieces of paper. 
• Students engaged in negotiations with peers their initial ideas and benefited from hearing each other’s reasoning about change. This ties into “Science Talk”.  Students learn best from each other.

Models for Public Reasoning

• When students change models in response to the arguments of others, it helps everyone reorganize their thinking about a set of science ideas.
• Drawing and changing models is about re-thinking the relationships among several different science ideas that act together as a system.

Other ways of publicly representing thinking that can be helpful in a classroom

• You may create an initial list of hypotheses that your students have about a science event
• Compare these hypotheses with one another
• Add to the list of hypotheses over the course of a unit
• Organize each lab activity into a table that documents what was done

This paper describes a “toolkit” of face-to-face for use in the classroom

• Called face-to-face because they are used with students.
• All the types we discuss have two things in common
• They represent students’ ideas and are constructed mainly by students.
• They change over time as students learn from observations,experiments, readings, presentations of ideas, and listening to the logic their peers and the teacher.

Some of the face-to-face tools we discuss here can start on the first or second day of the unit.  

They are usually put on poster paper or the board at the front or side of the room.

These remain up throughout the unit.

Small group models

• Most versatile way to represent students’ thinking.
• Students create their own initial models at the beginning of a unit, then change these over the course of a unit.

Provides strategies for focusing students on the phenomenon and eliciting the most from students.

Critique:

• I like how the author’s format.  The Article was easy to read and provided clear examples.  
• I like that the author emphasis the definition of a poor model.  

Maskan - Week 5 AST

Typically in the classroom students may engage in hands on activities, but they seldom connect to a bigger picture or understanding. The goal with each activity is that it connects to the how and why, bridge ideas, and allows students to use the science language. In order for an activity to allow these components, instructors need to be purposeful in allowing students to explore the big idea, come up with representations, understand and use different measurement tools like scientist. With my students I plan to use multiple activities to reinforce a deeper understanding of the content. Through practice students can see the relevance, have stronger explanations, and increase the opportunity for them to have conversation and share ideas with their peers (which will help with establishing classroom environment). Students will be able to use observations with data, push themselves to critically think and support their reasoning. Students will have opportunities to build and revise their models and explanations and consider how their thinking has changed and what additional information they may need.  Students will be able to use this in my classroom through small group work and make added changes through post its or we can use a whole class consensus (where we agree on a model and refine it over time). If limited on the amount of Post Its I have, I can tape the original paper and have students draw new “notes” with markers on the white board. Another tool that I will use is a checklist where students have to include certain ideas or relationships. This will ensure that students are using certain explanations and considering more specific ideas within their final product. By utilizing all these methods in my unit, students can model how “real” science is conceptualized and how ongoing changes in scientific practices allow refinement of theories and scientific laws. As a teacher moving forward, I need to be strategic on how I introduce activities to ensure that they are woven together and allow scaffolding, refinement, student voice and participation, and use of prior knowledge.

One thing that I consider is how long the unit should be when using these activities. At times I feel like I spend too much time and fall behind, and other times I think I move too quickly and students may not be able to connect the big ideas.  

Harris - Week 5

This week's readings discussed various ways to both show and support students' changes in thinking. While they offered many great suggestions for different norms to set and models to use there were three techniques that I am planning to implement as we return from spring break. The first is the idea of the “back pocket questions.” I continually circulate while my students are doing labs or activities but, too often, I am focused on keeping them on task and monitoring their progress rather than monitoring their thinking. Pre-writing a few questions beforehand will allow me to form higher-level questions that will push them past “what” to “why” and “how.”

            The second idea I look forward to trying is to have each student in a group work with a different color marker. Many of my students are initially reluctant to volunteer ideas especially if they are not certain of the answer. To encourage their thinking and bolster their confidence, I often use a lot of small group work in my classes. These groups allow them to bounce ideas off each other in a lower risk environment before sharing them with the class. However, I have consistently had trouble with ensuring that all members of the group are contributing equally. I have played around with individual vs. group grades for group projects but, for formative activities like an initial model, I have struggled with individual accountability. For this reason, I really like the idea of having a way to clearly see what each student has contributed to the model. These separate colors enable the students, as well as the teacher, to see who has contributed and who has yet to do so, enabling them to take responsibility for themselves and their group.

            Finally, I intend to implement the “summary charts” described in the reading. Much like the author, I have also seen my students struggle to recall what activities we’ve done earlier in the unit and their larger significance. As I enter the next unit I am going to work to build in 5-10min at the end of each class to recap both what we have done and what it means. For legibility’s sake, I am thinking that I will be the one to add new ideas to the chart at the recommendation of the students. However, longer-term, I would like to be able to pass more of the ownership to the students.

Neely - Wk5

http://ambitiousscienceteaching.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Primer-Supporting-Changes-in-Thinking.pdf

Learning for students occurs when materials are connected together with activities therefore making since. Any activity should be purposeful and relate work with the class it is being done with, at the same time it should provide “ideas to reason with.” Progressive modeling is the new how to make since of topics, but is often limited in the way teachers use them. Yet they can show how students change their thinking over time when revisited throughout a unit and should support class discussion. Having students explain a classmates reasoning can expand conversations when creating  class model, adding in the requirement of evidence can be key with this.  The inclusion of outside school life to the conversation is not something always practiced, but can make a difference in the connections being made.

After reading this I am thinking about reviewing for the EOC in Biology and how I might be able to review the different subjects with review models, but in their creation require students to make connections from their lives outside of school for each subject as I can.  Creating these with reasoning and having students explain each other’s reasoning with A-B table partner discussions seems like a way I could get the models to get at a deeper level and allow for students to make more personal connections with it.   

http://ambitiousscienceteaching.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Guide-Face-to-Face-Tools.pdf

Gist-

·       Small group models- created in a small group at the beginning of a concept and later modified (show the teacher their current thinking of a concept).

·       Before – during – after drawings allow students to think about a topic.

·       “draw what you would see if you had microscope eyes-” students can focus on a specific thing.

·       *Models should have context and not too genetic.

·       Model feedback can be done with sticky notes, and students can help strengthen eachother’s models – providing sentence frames can strengthen student’s feedback.

·       A checklist of requirements for a type of model can help, is best if students create it with you. 

Thinking next year for the first unit I should do a “whole class consensus model,” and then after that students should be comfortable to do one as groups (will be using the separate colors idea to confirm participation of remember) and eventually individually to show their thinking. 

I also like the idea of having students do an Activity-Patterns-Why-Clues page for each unit in their composition notebooks for the year.

Each of these readings went into the benefits of models with a bit of how to use them for teaching.  There was a good focus on connections to life and revisiting the concept throughout a lesson on a new subject. I now have fears of doing the un-recommended.  Right now I am just pondering their uses and trying to figure out appropriate application.