Purposeful Teaching Activities

The activities in the Science Continuum P-10 have been designed to support teachers to work from students’ existing ideas to build rich understandings of currently accepted science. They are titled according to the ‘pedagogical purpose’ they support.

The Science Continuum recognises several different pedagogical purposes:

• Bring out students' existing ideas
• Open discussion via a shared experience
• Provide an open problem to be explored via play or through problem solving
• Promote reflection on and clarification of existing ideas
• Challenge some existing ideas
• Shared intellectual control
• Promote reflection on how students' ideas have changed
• Focus students' attention on overlooked detail
• Practise using and building the perceived usefulness of scientific models
• Encouraging students to identify phenomena not explained by the (currently presented) scientific model or idea
• Helping students work out some of the ‘scientific’ explanations for themselves
• Collecting evidence/data for analysis
• Clarifying and consolidating ideas for communication to others

Bring out students' existing ideas

Bringing out students’ existing ideas is important to develop insights into students’ understandings. Some examples of activities where identifying students’ ideas is the main intent are: asking students to complete a written survey or to draw pictures representing their ideas.

Open discussion via a shared experience

Opening up discussion via a shared experience refers to activities where class discussion may begin with discussion of a shared experience, but then may move into encouraging students to rethink or extend their initial ideas. The 'shared experience’ may help to focus class discussion, but may also involve exposing students to previously unfamiliar phenomena such as placing dry ice in a sealed balloon.

Provide an open problem to be explored via play or through problem solving

Exploration via play can be an important pedagogy at lower/middle primary that can be used to bring out students’ ideas. Using play should not be confused with open-ended problem solving activities that can be used at higher levels. In using play, the teacher is much less concerned about the final destination or answer, rather s/he wants the students to observe, investigate and experiment with an engaging new environment.

Promote reflection on and clarification of existing ideas

Activities with any of the above purposes can lead to a need to promote reflection and clarification of existing ideas. There is much evidence to show that the views that students build for the world around them are often tacit, strongly held and not easily changed. If students are to be encouraged to restructure their understandings, it is important that they are initially clear on exactly what these are, why they hold them and also to become aware of alternative views. In achieving this, it is often helpful for the teacher to ‘delay judgement’ – not reveal his or her own views and not correct students ‘wrong’ ideas (at an early stage) but rather encourage students to articulate and clarify their existing thinking and secondly to build an understanding of the range of views in the class.

Challenge some existing ideas

At some point, usually after the range of competing student views has been established, it is appropriate to challenge some existing ideas. Sometimes (and ideally) this emerges naturally as students not only offer competing explanations or ideas, but also either suggest ways of testing these or raise phenomena that are inconsistent with a particular point of view. An example of the latter would be a student arguing that gravity must exist in a vacuum because astronauts were seen to walk on the moon. There are important learning benefits when the teacher is able to continue to delay judgement and facilitate a process of debating and testing ideas that have come from the students. One benefit is that it helps build a sense of shared intellectual control - where students feel that their ideas and suggestions are valued and useful.

Shared intellectual control

Shared intellectual control involves students feeling that ideas and suggestions are valued and useful. This builds students’ willingness to engage in what is often seen by many students as risky behaviours such as publicly offering and defending different points of view. Another benefit of sharing intellectual control with students is that the classroom better reflects aspects of how science works in the real world. Having said all this, there are occasions where the teacher will need to introduce a challenge to students’ existing ideas in ways that reveal his or her view – this is often the case, for example, when introducing a particulate view of matter and challenging a continuous view.

Promote reflection on how students' ideas have changed

Classroom research has shown that demonstrating that one view (such as the view that all moving objects are experiencing a net force in the direction of motion) is incorrect in one situation will not necessarily result in students restructuring their ideas in all other relevant situations. Their reflection needs stimulation as well as supportive discussion of the process of rethinking one’s understandings in order to keep them consistent. Hence there is a need to promote reflection on how students’ ideas have changed . One approach is to capture and document students’ original ideas and later return to them to reflect on their original ideas. Another approach is to raise a new situation for analysis and, in a supportive way, ask students whether or not they have used their original ideas in developing their explanation. This kind of metacognitive (knowing about knowing) reflection is an important part of both the Thinking Processes and Personal Learning VELS domains.

Focus students' attention on overlooked detail

A key difference between experts and novices is that experts know what is important to pay attention to when observing phenomena where they have expertise. Hence the need to sometimes focus students’ attention on overlookeddetail – the detail that experts have identified as important. Biologists, for example, know the importance of structure and function when observing animals and plants. Focusing students’ attention on, say, the feet or eye position of animals can be important for clarifying and challenging existing ideas and can also generate interest in what had appeared to be unimportant detail during exploration by play or in open-ended (practical) problems or challenges. It can also be a useful way of using a shared experience to stimulate a class discussion.

Practise using and building the perceived usefulness of scientific models

While it is often a powerful pedagogy, not all science concepts can be developed from classroom testing of competing students’ ideas. Sometimes students must be introduced to the way scientists have found most useful to explain phenomena. The notions of atoms and molecules as well as the construct of energy having many different forms are good examples of scientists’ ideas that are beyond discovery in the classroom. For students, the advantages of these ways of thinking will be built gradually and teachers should take every opportunity to practise using and building the perceived usefulness of these scientific models.

It is beneficial to revisit ideas in topics where they may not be the main focus as it will encourage students to see links between content which they may otherwise overlook. The topic of digestion, for example, is an area where student understanding can often be limited to the processes which occur in the stomach and intestines without seeing how these organs are connected to other body systems. They may overlook that macromolecules need to be broken down into smaller molecules before they can pass through the walls of capillaries to become useful for cellular function.

Encouraging students to identify phenomena not explained by the (currently presented) scientific model or idea

Encouraging students to identify phenomena not explained by the (currently presented) scientific model or idea is another way of building rich meaning for science concepts. This aspect of metacognition requires students to reflect on a scientific model such as the particle model and link it to their experiences of, for example, the behaviour and properties of solids, liquids and gases. This process can generate in students a need for the model to be explained in greater detail and can also reveal meanings that the students have constructed that are different from what the teacher intended. For example, a challenging question such as, 'If there are small gaps between the particles in a solid, why doesn’t water in a cup drip through these holes?’ reveals much about the students’ thinking about the molecular structure of liquids.

Helping students work out some of the ‘scientific’ explanations for themselves

Helping students work out some of the 'scientific' explanation for themselves has been a part of many teacher's classrooms for a long time; if set up appropriately, it is a very effective pedagogy - it is always better to work something out for yourself rather than to be told it. However, 'discovering' the science can sometimes be reduced to a simple recipe approach where the teacher provides the aim and method to students and then formulates an appropriate conclusion. Providing students with genuine choices and decisions to make about the design of practical activities leads students to being much more purposeful, reflective and analytical in their approach; similarly, the valuing of student ideas and sharing intellectual control also increases engagement and makes practical activities aim to test or extend students' ideas much more effective and authentic. This can take a little more time, but the outcomes are worth it.

Working out part of the science may involve classroom practical activities, but it can also involve inferring from information presented or researched, such as proposing explanations for changes in vegetation across a coastal habitat.

In some areas, students can work out most or even all of the relevant science from practical activities - the properties of magnets would be an example, however it is important to recognize that this will often not be able to be done in any authentic way. Students, for example, would need to be told that capillaries have very thin walls, however armed with this information, they may be quite capable of then working out for themselves how the body uses the bloodstream to transport oxygen from the lungs to muscle (and other) cells. In other words, a useful question for teachers when planning is 'What parts of the science might students be able to work out for themselves and what would they need to be able to do so?'

Collecting evidence/data for analysis

Collecting evidence/data for analysis has also been a part of many teachers’ classrooms for a long time. Data here is often data from classroom experiments, but it may also be out of classroom data such as when the moon is and is not visible at sunset as it moves through it's cycle of phases. Once again engagement is maximised if the data is perceived as having a genuine role in answering a question and working out part of the science, not merely illustrating a pre-determined right answer. This means, among other things, allowing adequate time for reflection and analysis of the significance of the data, providing, where possible, opportunities for choice and decision making in both what is explored and how and responding positively to student's ideas for extension activities that explore an issue further.

Clarifying and consolidating ideas for communication to others

One reason why teachers usually have a much richer understanding than their students about the ideas they are teaching is that they have thought about them in many more ways and contexts than their students. Rich understandings are built over time and encouraging students to identify phenomena not explained by the current model, building the perceived usefulness of models and promoting reflection on how ideas have changed all involve students in revisiting ideas in multiple ways. Clarifying and consolidating ideas for communication to others is another way of doing this. All teachers know how much they learn about an idea when they have to teach it to others and the same applies to students – provided the ‘teaching’ or communicating involves more than merely reading other people’s words. Hence encouraging creativity and variety in the communication has deeper purposes than just livening up the presentation. It involves students in thinking much more carefully about what they want to say and identifying and practising different ways of saying it.