OpenSciEd Unit 6.2 · Lesson 01 · 1.A
Look for: whether students are able to identify importa…
From Teacher Edition
Facilitation guidance from the lesson plan — what to notice in student thinking and how to respond while teaching.
Building towards
1.A.2 Develop an initial model to describe a phenomenon in which a substance changes temperature and identify structural parts of the system that slow down or speed up the temperature change (function).
What to look / listen for
whether students are able to identify important parts of the new system and include them in their models and
whether students are applying similar processes/ mechanisms to the related phenomena as they applied in their cup models, even if the mechanisms are inaccurate.
What to do
Students do not need to know how to explain the system completely right now; rather, they are demonstrating how they would model a new system and what they believe would be important to include. They can note on their models what each part is doing to help the object work and where they are uncertain about whether a part is important. If your students struggle with identifying important components of the new systems of the related phenomena, add more instructional time to work on this aspect of modeling. To do this, pick one of the related phenomena from the class list. Create a three-column chart with “Important parts”, “Not important parts”, and “Not sure parts”. Have students work together to decide the important parts of the system. Draw a sketch using these parts and the not sure parts but excluding the not important parts. The goal is for students to get more comfortable with figuring out which parts of the system need to be included in the model versus which parts are irrelevant.
Ask students to leave their science notebooks in the classroom for you to look at their models before the next class. If students have time, remind them to update their table of contents now.