Unit Plan Assignment  Story of What Happened  Making Sense of Focus Students’ Responses  Improvements to Parts I through IV Lesson Sequences for Teaching Definitions  Deductive (Learning Cycle)  Inductive (TOP or OP inquiry cycle)  Improvements in Your Understanding of Science Teaching

Teaching Science for Motivation and Understanding (pp ) “As a teacher, you will work with students who are not motivated to learn science, either because they don’t care (low value) or because they don’t believe that they can succeed (low expectancy). These problems often go together, and it isn’t always easy to tell which is the more prominent. Many students, for example, would rather be seen by their peers as lazy or rebellious than as stupid, so they will pretend not to care (saying they don’t value the task), even if the underlying problem is their fear of failure (low expectancy of success). You will probably worry a lot about unmotivated students.”

Engagement or Motivation to Learn Is… …effort that students put into active learning (developing useful and connected knowledge)

Necessary But Not Sufficient  Appropriate rewards (e.g. grades)  Moments of excitement (e.g., interesting demonstrations)  Teaching students to be motivated Essential preparation Modeling Coaching

Three Problems in Teaching for Engagement 1. Essential preparation a) Figuring out what’s engaging about the science for you personally b) Figuring out what’s engaging about your students for you personally 2. Modeling: Making your engagement with science and students visible to them 3. Coaching: Helping your students develop their own reasons for being engaged

Essential Preparation: Your Personal Interests  What is interesting to you about the science content you are teaching?  What is interesting to you about your students?  (It’s very hard to motivate students to learn if you don’t have honest answers to these questions.)  (Answering these questions honestly is intellectual work--more than “psyching yourself up”)

Essential Preparation: My Personal Reasons  What’s engaging about science? Elegant tools for making sense of the world, enabling you to see the simple patterns and models underneath all the complexity of phenomena Usefulness and connectedness Big Ideas, EPE, Practices of Science  What’s engaging about students? Informal scientific reasoning (initial EPE, misconceptions, reasoning strategies) Assessment of focus students

Unit Plan Assignment  Story of What Happened  Making Sense of Focus Students’ Responses  Improvements to Parts I through IV Lesson Sequence for teaching definitions  Deductive (Learning Cycle)  Inductive (TOP or OP inquiry cycle)  Improvements in Your Understanding of Science Teaching

Unit Plan Assignment  Story of What Happened  Making Sense of Focus Students’ Responses (Alternative)  Improvements to Parts I through IV Lesson Sequence for teaching definitions  Deductive (Learning Cycle)  Inductive (TOP or OP inquiry cycle)  Improvements in Your Understanding of Science Teaching

Engaging with the Content  Look back at the content for your unit or lesson sequence.  What about this content is interesting and important to you? Why do you care about this content? or  What about this content should be interesting and important for your students to understand? Why should it be important to them?  Answer one of these questions somewhere on the Unit Plan Report.

Engaging with your students  Option 1 – Show how your students’ understandings of science are interesting by completing “Making Sense of Focus Students’ Reponses” in Part V.  Option 2 – Answer the following question about each of your three focus students. What is interesting about this student?

Discussions in twos or threes  Look back at the content for your unit or lesson sequence.  What about this content is interesting and important to you? Why do you care about this content? or  What about this content is important for your students to understand? Why should it be important to them?  Option 1 – Show how your students’ understandings of science are interesting by completing “Making Sense of Focus Students’ Reponses” in Part V.  Option 2 – Answer the following question about each of your three focus students. What is interesting about this student?

Modeling: My Personal Strategies  Finding ways to reveal or talk about how you can see patterns, use models to explain and predict phenomena Demonstrations Cases: Stories that lead to interesting science Examples Metaphors, analogies  Finding ways to listen to students when they’re talking about their reasoning POE Personal interviews Student writing

Coaching: My Personal Strategies  Expectancy: Making sure that students’ effort can lead to success Preassessment, understanding students Reasonable objectives Lesson sequences  Value: Engaging and developing students’ interests Safe and welcoming classroom community Building usefulness and connectedness through lesson sequences