UMassAmherst | College of Education

Developing Models in the Classroom

Discussion-Leading Strategies to Support the Scientific Practice of Modeling

Discussion  Leading  Strategies  for  Fostering  Scientific  Reasoning  and Conceptual Understanding**

These pages describe a framework of discussion-leading strategies to help students as they learn Scientific Reasoning Practices for Modeling. In addition to general strategies for fostering student participation in whole-class discussions, this site presents many specific strategies to foster modeling practices and deeper conceptual understanding of content through discussions.

However, many science teachers who want to promote thinking skills complain that it is difficult to know how to start and maintain large group discussions in their classes. This site aims to give teachers strategies for promoting successful discussions that build qualitative conceptual models in science. Strong qualitative models provide an essential foundation for understanding quantitative models later.

A Guided Inquiry Approach for Teacher Educators, Teachers, Curriculum Developers, and Educational Researchers

A multitude of examples of teacher ‘moves’ (strategies) from actual classroom discussions led by experienced modeling teachers are included, organized by the type of objective and reasoning they foster. The pedagogical approach used in the examples is a type of guided inquiry, an approach that lies in between pure inquiry and pure lecture. The site is primarily oriented toward teacher educators for use as a resource for a graduate level education course. It should also be of interest to teachers, curriculum developers, educational researchers, and others interested in scientific modeling in the classroom.

Relation to NGSS in Promoting Modeling Practices, Systems Reasoning, and Disciplinary Core Ideas

In the US, users of the NGSS (Lead States) may note that in each of the classroom examples herein, students are engaged in modeling (Science and Engineering Practice) while reasoning about systems (Crosscutting Concept) in lessons with science content goals (Disciplinary Core Ideas). Thus the examples, gathered over years of classroom observations in middle and high schools, include important aspects of the NGSS 3-D approach. The learning is rich and layered, and so are the teaching strategies that support it.

   Evolving progression of models generated by students during discussion: vessels and alveoli in a lung

Some Questions Addressed in These Pages

• How can a teacher get a discussion started, and how can it be maintained?
• How can teachers be helped to build up discussion-leading skills gradually? How can teachers help students build discussion-participation skills?
• What should teachers do when students’ alternative or partial conceptions surface in discussion? How can teachers respond without dismissing student thinking, while maintaining progress toward content goals?
• How can teachers teach students scientific thinking skills in class and still reach content goals?
• (For USA users of NGSS) How do teachers foster Modeling Practices in a way that helps students master Disciplinary Core Ideas along with Crosscutting Concepts such as reasoning about systems?

An Overview of the Framework of Strategies

Descriptions of these and other layers or levels of classroom activity are derived from our observations of modeling activity in guided inquiry lessons in 6th-12th grade science classrooms. We see the levels reflected both in student reasoning processes and in the strategies that teachers use to foster them during discussion.

Our goal is to help teachers have successful modeling discussions. The 4-level framework offers a way to organize discussion strategies into smaller groups or “chunks” that can be learned one level at a time.

Teacher Gestures as a Visualization Strategy

Explore the Modeling Discussions Website!

The site has sections in the main menu at the top of each page designed to address the needs of multiple audiences.

• Core of This Teaching Approach is recommended as a starting point for teachers and teacher educators. It uses a classroom example to provide introductory guidance on how to foster modeling practices and conceptual understanding in whole class discussions at the middle and high school level.
  

• The Educator’s Tour page uses a different classroom example to provide an overview of the structure of the 4-level framework of strategies.

• The Strategy Catalog page summarizes all the strategies on the site, with examples, for each of the four strategy levels.

• For those teaching education courses, Course Syllabus Ideas contains suggestions for using this site as a resource for a graduate course. It includes video examples and activities developed from experience teaching aspects of this material in courses for pre- and in-service teachers.
  

• An Introduction to the Full Theory provides a fuller rationale for the organization of the framework and a graphical map of the Strategy Catalog.
  

• Although we recommend starting with the first two items above, if you want to jump right into the Strategy Catalog, the easiest to start with are probably the general Level I Participation Strategies for helping students participate actively in discussions. Developing a culture of group participation over time is an important prerequisite for using the other strategies.
  

• Articles include case studies of active classroom discussions in which teachers were using the strategies to scaffold students as they learned about systems in the context of physics, physical science, and biology.