Sense-Making Science Talk Assignment
Items in blue require action/completion
Why are you doing this assignment? The goal of this assignment is to give you some experience talking with students about science and an opportunity to find out about the resources your students bring to the learning of science. In particular, this assignment is meant to help you to:
(a) prepare, engage in, and reflect on a science talk in which a small group of students has the opportunity to do some sense-making about a scientific phenomenon;
(b) find out more about how students are ‘figuring out’ this phenomenon and what resources they are using to do this; and
(c) prepare to use this information to plan your science lesson.
This assignment has two parts: planning and conducting the science talk (Part 1) and transcribing, reflecting on, and writing about the science talk (Part 2).
Part 1: Planning and conducting the science talk
1a) Planning the science talk
Start by identifying a real-world phenomenon that could be used to engage your students in sensemaking (about how/why the phenomenon occurs) related to your topic. Carefully design a how/why discussion question that asks students to explain how or why the phenomenon occurs. This will allow you to see how students might be working to make sense of the phenomenon and understand what resources your students bring to figuring out this phenomenon and to thinking about your topic more generally.
You should plan to obtain two types of information from students in your science talk. They are listed separately here to highlight the need to address both, but you may find it easier to mix these questions together in your actual science talk.
● Students’ science-related ideas, thinking/reasoning, ways of figuring out.
○ What have your students noticed about the phenomenon and the related artifacts you brought to the science talk?
○ What ideas and explanations do they have for the phenomenon?
○ How are your students thinking about and explaining the phenomenon? How and why do they think the phenomenon happens?
○ What else do students know about the topic you discussed? What is your evidence that they know this? (Be sure that you are thinking about more than students’ use of vocabulary terms.)
● Students’ prior experiences and cultural resources for science learning.
○ What are the funds of knowledge and experiences that students draw on during the science talk?
○ What kinds of experiences have your students had with this topic or phenomenon? (Think about experiences inside/outside their homes, traveling, in popular culture or peer activities, from engaging in hobbies, etc. For example, does anyone in your students’ families have a job or hobby related to this topic or phenomenon? Have your students lived or traveled anywhere that gave them experiences with this topic or phenomenon?)
○ Where have your students learned about this topic or phenomenon?
You should also plan to ask some improvisational questions “off script” and in response to the ideas your students share. Using resources from TE403 and your own ideas, brainstorm some “back-pocket” questions you might use in-the-moment to probe or press your students during the science talk. Prepare alternative wording and open-ended prompts for when students say, “I don’t know” or “What do you mean?”
Tips for planning your questions:
● Choose a scientific phenomenon associated with your topic –something not too big or complicated, one that students can start to work through, but also not something that is entirely obvious.
● Start the science talk with an open-ended driving question to which all students can respond. Prepare several differently worded versions of your driving question, to help ensure all students can grasp it.
● Use props and/or examples of your phenomenon to engage students and (if possible) allow students to manipulate props to make the phenomenon more concrete.
● Ask open-ended questions. Avoid multiple-choice type questions, questions that ask students to define words, and questions with right or wrong answers.
● A big part of this science talk is to elicit what students out-of-school experiences. Avoid the trap of asking only about ideas students should have learned in school.
Submit a written plan for your science talk which includes the following:
● Your topic
● NGSS performance expectation
● A scientific phenomenon associated with the topic
● A driving question related to the phenomenon
● Any props or artifacts you will use to launch the talk
● A set of 3-5 planned questions to engage students in doing some initial work figuring out this phenomenon and to help you see how they are doing this and what funds of knowledge they are bring with them. They may include questions such as:
● What happened?
● How do you think that happened? What was going on?
● Why do you think that happened? What do you think caused that to happen?
● Tell me about a time you have seen or experienced something like [the phenomenon] before.
● A set of three talk moves/talk tools to help students express their ideas and reasoning. The “annex” to Chapter 14 of our required text (pp. 332-333) contains a list of productive talk tools.
1b) Conducting the science talk
After revising your plan in response to instructor feedback, conduct a “science talk” with a small group of (4-5) students. Be sure to video or audio record it so that you do not have to focus on taking notes. If your mentor teacher indicates you must engage the whole class in a science talk, you will need to video record because you won’t be able to remember who was talking and whether that student talked again without seeing who it is. The science talk should be about 30 minutes long, give or take 10 minutes. In Part 2 of the assignment you will transcribe and analyze a portion of this discussion.
Tips for conducting the talk:
● Your plan is a guide. You should have your questions in front of you while facilitating the science talk. But do not feel like you need to ask every question. If the students spend more time than you planned on one question, or if you ask follow-up questions that take more time, that’s ok.
● Remember your purpose is to ask some stimulating questions and to listen to students, rather than sharing your ideas and information. Your role here is to learn from them and about their funds of knowledge, not to teach them something new.
● Avoid the IRE pattern of discourse in which you Initiate a question, students Respond, and you Evaluate their answer by saying “Great!” Right!” or Sounds good!”! or by indicating that the response is incorrect. If you evaluate what students say, they will stop working on thinking through the answer. The goal here is NOT to teach or to facilitate convergence towards a particular way of thinking. It is to facilitate sense-making and to find out how and what students are thinking and how they are working to figure things out.
● In a small group, make sure that you are hearing from each student in the group. Also consider encouraging students to respond to one another’s ideas if they don’t do so on their own. (See the talk moves on pp. 332-333 of our required text for examples of how to do this.)
Grading:
3 pts Scientific phenomenon, driving question, and props will engage students with a relevant phenomenon using concrete and/or experiential representations. The driving question is open-ended, focused on a why or how question, interesting to students, and written in student-friendly language.
4 pts 3-5 planned questions are likely to elicit students’ sense-making and provide some insight into their resources for sense-making.
3 pts 3 planned talk moves
Part 2: Science Talk Reflection
The purpose of the science talk reflection is to help you look closely at how the students in your classroom are thinking about and figuring out your scientific phenomenon and the role you, as the teacher, play in that process. In particular, you should think hard about the kinds of sense-making the students are doing, the resources they leverage to do so, and the teacher moves you make in support of student sense-making.
Recall from class discussion that sense-making refers to how students make sense of, or develop ideas about, scientific phenomena. To do so, students draw from a whole range of resources, including prior knowledge; everyday experiences; family traditions, customs or culture; books; internet; and popular culture. At the same time, the kinds of moves a teacher makes have a big influence on what students say and do in your classroom. Did you do something in particular that helped a child tell her story? Did a particular question invite her to share her ideas? Did you model a productive way of talking about science?
2a) Science Talk Transcript
Select approximately 10 minutes of your science talk that shows a lot of what students are doing to make sense of/figure out the phenomenon and what resources they are using to do that. You may select a 10-minute continuous segment or 2-3 smaller segments that add up to 10 minutes. Then transcribe the segment(s) verbatim. You should use pseudonyms in place of your students’ names (you can let them use their own names!). You might want to try transcribe.wreally.com to help with transcribing. (You can sign up for one week for free.)
In addition to the transcript, write a 1-2 paragraph description of what happened right before your (first) segment and right after your (last) segment. If you have multiple segments, also write a brief (1-2 sentence) description of what happened between the segments.
2b) Transcript Analysis:
Respond to the five prompts in the assignment template. Your response should be approximately 2 pages, single spaced.
Grading:
3 pts Transcript of approximately 10 minutes of the science talk, focused on students’ sense-making and accompanied by descriptions of what happens…
