OpenSciEd Unit 7.4 · Lesson 09 · 9.A
Look for: Students should ask questions about how a pla…
From Teacher Edition
Facilitation guidance from the lesson plan — what to notice in student thinking and how to respond while teaching.
Building towards
9.A Ask questions to refine our model of plants to show the inputs and outputs, and energy and matter flows over time to explain how food molecules can be present during times that plants do not have leaves or chloroplasts.
What to look / listen for
- Students should ask questions about how a plant can make food if the structures (leaves) and/or inputs (sunlight, water) are not present.
- Students may ask questions about why plants even make food and/or if plants need food to grow.
- Students should ask testable questions that will help us collect data and figure out how to refine and/or revise our plant model.
What to do
If students struggle to come up with questions to add to the DQB around how plants can make food at times when there are structures missing, here are a few strategies you might try to help them think more about this confounding question:
- Ask for a few students to share their questions as an example.
- Replay the video of the tree being tapped and encourage students to make more noticings of the environment and the tree when it is tapped.
- Encourage students to look back at the reading and think about how the trees are different when they are tapped compared to what we have in our model of the plant from Lesson 8.
Review these steps for forming the DQB:
The first student comes up to the DQB with their sticky note, faces the class, and remains standing. The student reads their question off the note and then posts it on the DQB near the section of the consensus model or related phenomena it is most related to. (Note: If the model is off to the side, students can post their notes in a new space on the board.)
- The students who are listening should raise their hands if they have a question that relates to the question that was just read aloud.
- The first student selects the next student whose hand is raised.
The second student reads his or her question and says what other question on the board it relates to and why or how. Then the student places his or her question near the question it most relates to and selects the next student. This process continues until everyone has had a chance to post a question.
Organize questions into groups. As students share, questions will naturally start clustering into similar parts of the model or similar types of questions. Once students have completed their sharing, ask them to identify the categories of questions and help them organize them into clusters by giving them a related umbrella question or category label.
The big questions for the DQB should now be
“How can plants have food molecules in them when all the inputs or structures needed to make food molecules aren’t present? Why do plants need food molecules?”
Student questions may include the following:
Why would plants be making food molecules?
Are plants making them to eat them somehow?
What are the plants using them for?
Did they really come from the leaves to here?
Can plants make sugar without leaves?
If plants need sun to make sugar, what happens at night? Do they stop making sugar?
What happens in the winter?
If plants stop making food, do they stop taking in CO2 and giving off O2?
Why don’t plants die in the dark?
Why don’t plants die when they don’t have leaves?
Summarize new territory the class has questions about. Say, We really have many questions about how plants can have food molecules when they don’t have everything they need! Let’s dig into some of these new questions next time.