Asking high school students to reveal what they really think about what causes a natural or designed phenomenon is risky business. Risky in that it requires students to take the intellectual and social risk of sharing their thinking, which may or may not be correct. We thought all we needed to do was to ask them to share their thinking. But we discovered it takes intentionally listening to who really is or isn’t talking and teacher moves to shift the culture from some students sharing ideas some times to all students revealing their thinking. We’d like to share two stories about what it really takes.

Ms. Berk’s Physics Class: Using Whiteboards to Visualize Energy Transfers and Compare Ideas

Student discussion and equity in sharing ideas is especially important in freshman physics. Core concepts and graphing methods are abstract and difficult for many students. Discussing these concepts and giving students equal opportunity to share ideas is crucial to success in physics. Assigning roles during the activity and sharing their ideas on a whiteboard helps accomplish this.

Before the energy conservation lesson, we defined what energy is and what forms it can take. Instead of a teacher-led lesson, students learn through a hands-on activity with assigned roles, working in pairs, with specific tasks to accomplish. Student pairs transfer colored water among three graduated cylinders representing total energy, kinetic/moving energy (Ek), and gravitational potential energy (Eg). They are given a scenario: a dog sitting still on a bed. Student A “acts out” transferring energy/water from the total energy cylinder to the Eg cylinder. In the scenario, the dog jumps down from the bed to the floor. Student B then transfers all of the energy/water to the Ek cylinder. They must discuss the question with their partner: Did the total amount of energy/water ever change?

Next, student pairs act out their own scenario with the water, switching roles. The pair then needs to translate what happens with the cylinders to sketches on a whiteboard. Student A sketches the change in cylinder energy/water level.  Student B then shares their whiteboard results with another pair of students, who have a different scenario.

Together, the pairs must then analyze all of the scenarios, seeking a pattern about the total energy in a system. They write down their group’s “rule” about a system’s total energy.

The class does a gallery walk of all of the groups’ boards to develop a class definition of the law. Finally, students convert their whiteboard sketches to bar graphs.

During this process, students develop the core idea of conservation of energy. The teacher is available to answer questions, while evaluating student progress. Additionally, each student has the opportunity to share their ideas through pictures, graphs, writing, and talking.

Mrs. MacColl’s Biology Class: Alone Zone Really Matters!

This year, my students seemed more timid, self-conscious, and fearful of sharing their ideas than students in years past. Even with this classroom climate, I was surprised by my students’ reluctant performance in a Gallery Walk and their collecting and sharing of ideas.

I asked students to work with their lab partners to create a poster illustrating the structure and function of randomly assigned cells. Then I asked the partners to participate in a Gallery Walk to understand and make sense of others’ ideas. During their timed rotations, they were asked to categorize the cells as either epithelial, muscle, nerve, or connective tissue. As partners visited each poster, I asked them to discuss and analyze their ideas with one another.

I noticed it was awkwardly silent as students gathered the required information from the posters. I tried to expand the structure of their discussion to encourage more talking. I thought if I could get them to share aloud, differences in their ideas might press them to think more deeply about their own ideas. I cued students at the end of each rotation to use a sentence starter such as “I think…because…”and provided one minute for partners to share in this manner. The sentence frame increased the talk, but frequently only one of the partners was talking:

Partner A: I think red blood cells are connective tissue because connective tissue helps transport things.

Partner B: Yeah. I didn’t have time to write it.

Not a productive discussion. Therefore, I required 30 seconds of Alone Zone (private think time) before partner sharing to increase the likelihood of equitable talk, even if partners disagreed. Then I told students they would have 30 seconds to decide what type of tissue the cell made, then cued them to each share their “I think…because….”  With the addition of the private think time, I noticed both partners shared equitably and often shared different ideas! This strategy made my students’ thinking visible:

Partner A:  I think red blood cells are connective tissue because they flow in the bloodstream.

Partner B: I think red blood cells are epithelial tissue because they cover the interior of hollow organs.

Now that I could hear each student’s idea about red blood cells, it was revealed that half the students thought red blood cells were epithelial tissue, while the other half thought they were connective tissue.  Because I found a way for students to reveal their ideas, I recognized that this provided an opportunity for students to engage in argument for and against each of those claims using evidence.

Another example of the power of highly-structured protocol occurred during our “Cell Tank” activity, in which I asked students to analyze how a cell would function when missing their assigned organelle. I asked each group to create a Google document in which they could individually add their own unique ideas. I thought for sure I would observe all of my students contributing equally, especially since we had just practiced the Partner A/B structured protocol. Not quite. That idea crashed and burned as I observed one or two out of the four partners typing away, while the other two or three took a backseat.

On to Plan B. I distributed a large piece of butcher paper to each group and instructed each group member to choose a different color and physically write down their ideas. This strategy proved successful. Perhaps it gave my students the Alone Zone time they needed to think and write down their ideas. Perhaps they felt more comfortable sharing their ideas in writing.  Nonetheless, it gave me and my students the opportunity to analyze one another’s ideas and allowed me to observe equal participation.

So What Does It Really Take?

So many strategies are available for making students’ ideas visible. One “aha” moment for us was realizing the importance of having group accountability in place so that all students would share ideas. The second, and perhaps most important, “aha” moment was that listening to what students aren’t saying and intentionally providing structure really does increase the amount and quality of student intellectual engagement. It is only when students’ real ideas are revealed that teachers can guide students from their current conceptions to constructing lasting explanations of how the world works.

What strategies for making students’ thinking visible have worked for you in your classroom?

Angie Berk is a physics and biology teacher at Arcadia High School in Arizona’s Scottsdale Unified School District.

Jen MacColl is a National Board Certified Teacher who teaches (with her sidekick Benjamin) biology, zoology, and botany at Chaparral High School in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Kristen Moorhead is a consultant for Professional Learning Innovations, LLC. She is currently coaching K–12 science teachers in Scottsdale Unified School District as they shift their instruction to reflect the vision of the National Research Council’s A Framework for K–12 Science Education.

Note: This article is featured in the February 2020 issue of Next Gen Navigator, a monthly e-newsletter from NSTA delivering information, insights, resources, and professional learning opportunities for science educators by science educators on the Next Generation Science Standards and three-dimensional instruction.  Click here to sign up to receive the Navigator every month.

Visit NSTA’s NGSS@NSTA Hub for hundreds of vetted classroom resources, professional learning opportunities, publications, ebooks and more; connect with your teacher colleagues on the NGSS listservs (members can sign up here); and join us for discussions around NGSS at an upcoming conference.

The mission of NSTA is to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.

Our classrooms are dynamic places where young learners gather to figure out the natural world. How can we be sure they are all making sense of the phenomena during this process? How do we know what they are thinking?

We tend to grasp how they think through our selected formative and summative assessments, but this is not enough if we want our students to develop proficiency in science. We need our students to “go public,” revealing their thinking, their models, and their ideas, and it is our challenge to ensure all our students do this. When students employ science and engineering practices and crosscutting concepts to make sense of the phenomena in question, their thinking becomes apparent. However, as science teachers, we must avoid resuming our old assessment routines and focus our energy on the process and progress students achieve while making sense of phenomena.

We can do this by listening to students argue from evidence during discussions, by analyzing their Claim Evidence Reasoning (C-E-R) posters, and by closely examining their model revisions during a lesson set or unit. At the heart of two curriculum projects, OpenSciEd and NGSX, students go public with their ideas. Borrowing from these projects as well as STEM Teaching Tools, I armed myself this year with tools and routines to encourage all my students to participate in a community of scientific practice.

As a class, we identified norms for discussions centered on respect, equity, commitment to community, and advancing our thinking. We refer to our list to ensure everyone is meeting the goals of our discussions. But I found that having norms is not enough to foster lively discussions advancing scientific knowledge, so I decided to survey my students about their feelings toward participating in discussions. The results showed they prefer to participate in small-group discussions; however, in those small groups, they are unsure about how to ask probing questions.

With help from STEM Teaching Tools PD Playlist: Promoting Student Science Talk in the Classroom, I introduced “partner conversation supports” to my students, and incorporated “Talk Moves” from TERC’s Talk Science Primer into my discussion routines. Since I combined these resources with our class norms, my students are now having more focused discussions within their small groups, and they are now the ones driving whole-class discussions that include everybody’s voices.

An alternative to class discussions that I find to be more enjoyable for some students in making their thinking visible is to create team posters of their C-E-Rs, followed by Gallery Walks. In a recent sensemaking lesson, students considered three lines of evidence while addressing their claim about the co-evolution of biology and geology on Earth. In small groups, they discussed their lines of evidence in relation to the mechanisms for change over geologic time. Each group considered different pieces of evidence, which translated into variation across the C-E-Rs. During the Gallery Walk, a student from each team presented their poster, and after the presentations, students visited each poster, equipped with sticky notes to leave comments.

The non-threatening nature of this routine not only encouraged all students to participate in some way, but also made their thinking visible to the entire class. Their resulting individual C-E-Rs were much richer than before, which I think can be attributed to their group effort in analyzing and interpreting the data and sharing their thoughts using posters, both of which pushed them to think more deeply about their claims.

In this last routine, students are only “going public” with me as they build and revise their models.  It is unbelievably enlightening to monitor student progress over a larger unit as they make sense of phenomena. Recently, my students were challenged to determine the order of events in Earth’s early history, and this required them to start with an initial model, then revise it as more evidence was introduced. They worked in small groups to analyze the data, but they worked individually to create their arguments. With our learning management system, I was able to access their work during the two weeks of the unit. I reviewed their work and adjusted my lessons as needed, and while doing so, I found it fascinating to see how students revised their models along the way as more evidence was introduced. At the end of the unit, students combined their ideas to create one model they shared with the class.

These few routines not only connect with multiple science and engineering practices (NRC 2012, and NGSS 2013), but also mirror the practice of scientists. I would be doing a disservice to my students if we did not debrief the use of these routines as they relate to the work of scientists. If I don’t have a first-person example to share, I seek examples from the history of science within my domain, or I share resources such as Tools of Science. How do your students go public with their ideas?

References

National Research Council (NRC). 2012. A framework for K-12 science education: Practices, crosscutting concepts, and core ideas. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.

NGSS Lead States. 2013. Next Generation Science Standards: For states, by states. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. www.nextgenscience.org/next-generation-science-standards.

Missy Holzer, PhD, has taught science in New Jersey for more than 30 years and loves her job more today than when she first started. Her philosophy of education includes using hands-on, minds-on inquiry using real-time and original data and data tools to encourage lifelong learning in her students. Holzer enjoys field research immensely and has assisted with data collection in places such as Svalbard; Nicaragua; Kenya; Ecuador; Jamaica; Costa Rica; off the coasts of Oregon, South Carolina, Cape Cod; and Chile. She is a Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) Ambassador and worked alongside astronomers to collect astronomical data in the stratosphere. In the classroom, she uses her field experiences to develop units of study to inspire students to explore their natural world. Holzer is secretary of National Earth Science Teachers Association (President 2012–2014), has served on many state and national committees, and presents at local, regional, and national conferences. She served on the development team for the 2009 New Jersey Science Core Content Standards and on the State Leadership Review Team for the NGSS, and authored the Capstone High School Science Model Curriculum after New Jersey adopted the NGSS. She is an Achieve peer review panelist, reviewing lessons and units for NGSS congruency. Through workshop offerings, she supports formal and non-formal educators as they transition to using NGSS. She holds a MAT in science education, a MS in geography, and a PhD in science education.

Note: This article is featured in the February 2020 issue of Next Gen Navigator, a monthly e-newsletter from NSTA delivering information, insights, resources, and professional learning opportunities for science educators by science educators on the Next Generation Science Standards and three-dimensional instruction.  Click here to sign up to receive the Navigator every month.

Visit NSTA’s NGSS@NSTA Hub for hundreds of vetted classroom resources, professional learning opportunities, publications, ebooks and more; connect with your teacher colleagues on the NGSS listservs (members can sign up here); and join us for discussions around NGSS at an upcoming conference.

The mission of NSTA is to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.