Perhaps your classes are getting into the swing of this sensemaking thing--they're engaged and model-building is starting to come more easily. Suddenly you realize that you have not recorded a single grade in the grade-book for two weeks! And to make matters worse, progress reports or grades are due in the near future!
"Making student thinking visible" means that we are often recording ideas publicly in the model-based sensemaking classroom. Though at times it makes sense to record ideas electronically (e.g. in the PowerPoint slides), there are many ideas we want ot make continually available to the class as we continue to engage with new phenomena and questions. So, if you are (for example) teaching 5 periods of biology, where do all of the posters go?
Student absences in a discussion-based curriculum that requires classroom engagement with data, peers, and teachers simply cannot be re-created in response to student absences. In some communities, student absence may be a chronic issue. In others, it may be episodic or situational (e.g. my last period of the day is plagued with athlete excused absences due to travel for away games).
Even if your students seem to be "getting it" as you move through exploring the phenomena and building model ideas over the course of a unit, you may be disappointed in their ability to apply the model to write a final explanation for the anchoring phenomenon (introduced at the start of the unit) or a new phenomenon.
Models in science are never really "final", but in the classroom, there are times when we need to put a "period" (or at least a "comma") on our model so that we can move on to new phenomena and ideas. Working through the process of finalizing the model with your students can be tricky, especially if there are ideas that still need to be evaluated or even generated before you are ready to do so. Here are some tips for handling pieces of this process that teachers have found useful.
For each triangle on the website, the central component is the list of model ideas displayed near the top of the page. These are the ideas we suggest are key to explaining the phenomena at hand. They are also the closest way we have to tracking content alignment with NGSS in a model-based classroom.
In this curriculum, we make our models explicit, discuss, revise and add to them in order to make sense of some phenomenon we've noticed in the biological universe. Since most of the data or patterns we work with are relatively specific, our models naturally come together with some very specific language.
Developing models with students requires that we attend to a number of things. Our students must have something to share ideas about--a phenomenon that requires explanation)--and often need to have first developed some kind of a focal question so that our attention to that phenomenon is bounded. It is also critical that students feel safe in sharing their ideas.
Most any time we have a question in the classroom, we want to give students the chance to share their initial thinking. Not only does this give students a chance to voice their ideas, it also gives us (as teachers) a window into their current thinking, some of which we may want to leverage and some of which we may need to work to re-work over the course of the unit.
1. Why develop an “initial model” before students have all the relevant information?