Reference Peer Feedback

Provide feedback regarding the presence or absence of the specific use of similarities and differences in body structures and the presence or absence of explicit reference to time and environments in the patterns they describe. Emphasize the role that students should adopt when they realize they missed a key point that a peer made in their arguments. In particular, remind students to ask their peers for clarification and/or restating of key ideas when they realize they have a gap in their recall or understanding of one or more of the ideas a peer shared.

Additional Lesson 5 Teacher Guidance

SUPPORTING STUDENTS IN MAKING CONNECTIONS IN ELA

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.8.1.D Acknowledge new information expressed by others, and, when warranted, qualify or justify their own views in light of the evidence presented.

On day 2 of this lesson, students have two opportunities to engage in respectful feedback conversations with their classmates:

as groups who examined similarities and differences in body structures of the same organism (horseshoe crabs, horses, or whales) come together and share their ideas and models

when students form triads to share their thinking and models showing relationships among body structures, time in which organisms live(d), and environments in which organisms live(d) for all three organisms investigated during this lesson

By this final unit of 8th grade, students should be very familiar with classroom norms that guide respectful conversations. Closely listening and trying to make sense of their peers’ ideas should be a well-established practice in small-group argument sharing. Students should be supporting their ideas and models with patterns in the data sets that their peers shared. Students should also be posing and responding to questions to elicit additional details or to clarify the patterns in these models when there is something they don’t understand.