When you weave essential practices into your daily or weekly routine, you make good time to teach and deepen those practices. As I think of my efforts to better science teaching and learning, I am thinking about how I'll weave the standards into our typical science learning routine.Science
Our typical science routine will include the standards in the following ways:
- Teacher Prep/Student Introduction: As I prep materials for the exploration and/or experiment, I'll make sure that the lab report and introductory materials include following:
- Background information that connects the learning to prior study as well as relevant, timely events, people, and places.
- Essential questions, discussion, and definition of the hypothesis, problem, and/or topic.
- Review of plan including variables, controls, materials/tools, data collection, main questions, and process.
- Opportunity to create, complete, and update 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional models
- Study, Exploration, and Investigation: Students will work cooperatively with classmates to do the following:
- Prep the exploration space and collect needed materials.
- Follow the process determined in a step-by-step, collaborative manner.
- Collect data via writing down information, taking photos, drawing pictures, and making other models to demonstrate what's happening and what they've learned.
- Think about what's happening and begin to construct explanations, solutions, analysis, and data interpretation.
- Discuss, debate, explain, and communicate findings: Students will complete lab reports together which lead them through an analytical process. Then students will figure out how they will best communicate their findings using models, charts, data, specific evidence, next steps, and questions that remain.
The challenge with incorporating the standards which means going deeper with the teaching and learning means that as the educator I have to think deeply about how I design learning experiences with and for students so that we use the time we have in meaningful and beneficial ways.
Math
Similar to science, I'd like to begin the math explorations and learning events as much as possible with a big question, relevant background information, and connections to student experiences, interests, and needs. As much as possible, I'll organize the math practices in a format similar to science investigations with the following, similar components:
- Teacher Prep/Student Introduction:
- Background information that connects the learning to prior study as well as relevant, timely events, people, and places.
- Essential questions, discussion, and definition of the problem, big question/idea, and/or topic. We will make sense of the problem.
- Review the learning plan that will include opportunities for abstract and qualitative reasoning, construction of viable arguments, creation of models, strategic use of tools, precise work, systematic thinking, use of helpful/useful structures, and identification of patterns and other repeated reasoning.
- Study, Exploration, and Investigation: Students will work on their own and cooperatively to do the following:
- Prep the exploration space and collect needed materials.
- Follow the process determined in a step-by-step, collaborative manner.
- Explore, collect data, and solve multiple problems in a systematic way with the use of math models, tools/materials, and collaboration.
- Collect data via writing down information, taking photos, drawing pictures, and making other models to demonstrate what's happening and what they've learned.
- Think about what's happening and begin to construct explanations that demonstrate relationships, connections, patterns, rules, properties, and more that match this problem set/investigation with principles that apply to similar situations.
- Discuss, debate, explain, and communicate findings: Students will complete analysis/problem solving which leads them through an analytical process. Then students will figure out how they will best communicate their findings using models, charts, data, specific evidence, next steps, and questions that remain. Students will learn how to listen to each other and successfully debate findings.
