KnowAtom's Blog

What is cooperative learning? Cooperative learning is an instructional model designed to improve student learning outcomes by promoting teamwork. Do you allow students to work together on small group learning projects? If so, you're already modeling cooperative learning strategies in your classroom. When our students work together on interactive classroom activities, they strengthen communication, social, and critical thinking skills. When collaborating in small groups of two to four peers, students have the opportunity to take responsibility for their own learning. Collaborative learning strategies require teachers to give up some responsibility for classroom instruction to their students, letting them take the lead.

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One of the most important things we can teach our students, no matter what grade level or topic you teach, is how to ask good questions. When I think about this important topic, I can't help but consider how my teaching style has changed over the past 20 years. Today, when I think about how to support student centered learning in my classroom, I want to make sure that I am modeling good questions. That's because modeling is an important way to teach students how to ask good questions themselves. I am going to share with you what a good question looks like and how to teach your students ways to identify and use them effectively.

A student-centered classroom starts with the teacher. We've learned that we can improve student engagement and achieve better outcomes by giving up some of the control we have as teachers. Students who are given an active role in the classroom have more opportunities to think critically about the concepts and how they relate to the world around them. Rather than asking students to read and memorize, we need to be asking them to collaborate with their peers, discover new ideas, and make strong connections. With student centered learning, giving students a voice in the classroom helps improve student engagement, but students need to develop the skills to take the lead. Learning how to ask authentic questions of their peers, their teachers, and their sources – is a great way to start.

Student centered instruction and asking good questions

Good questions are good questions regardless of who you're interacting with or what subject you're teaching. If you're not a KnowAtom teacher, if you're a teacher who teaches another subject, a parent, or a principal, all of these things will apply to your students as well! Let's look first at where we can expect students to ask good questions when implementing a student-centered approach during a lesson.

KnowAtom's science curriculum starts off with a nonfiction reading component every time. That's where a lot of the questioning will happen in a student centered teaching model. From there, we move on to Socratic dialogue, where students discuss the questions, wonders, or connections they made from the reading. Questioning plays a big part in this section of the lesson and if we can improve our students' questioning skills, we can improve our classroom dialogue.

Students then move into planning, and we ask them to think like scientists or engineers. That entails a lot of questions about what's going to happen in the hands-on investigation portion of the unit. Then, the students carry out their investigation, experiment, or engineering activity. Lots and lots of questions are happening as part of this section as well. Finally, students share their conclusions in a debrief. One of the things that I enjoy most with student centered learning is listening to students question each other about their data and their outcomes.

The purpose of questioning in student centered learning

What's the purpose of questions? The main purpose of encouraging students to ask good questions is to engage them in taking a position on a concept or big idea from the reading. When you think about it, that's a really risky proposition. Perhaps that's why when I first started teaching, I asked questions like "What is a hurricane?" rather than "How are hurricanes related to the water cycle?"

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What is CER? CER stands for Claim, Evidence, Reasoning. It is essentially a framework that educators use to teach the scientific method. Simplified, it looks like:

Claim (answer to a question) + Evidence (student’s data) + Reasoning (scientific principle or rule)

When we ask students to support scientific claims using CER and we model thinking moves in the process, we help spark their own curiosity about the world around them. When teachers introduce KnowAtom’s hands-on engineering labs and science experiments, they are bringing real world phenomena into the classroom. And when students make a scientific claim and back it up, they are taking charge of their own learning process.

Learning about thinking moves was one of the most transformative steps in my 20-year teaching career. One of my favorite quotes is from an American writer, Elbert Hubbard, who said, “The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without a teacher.” Thinking moves provide a structured approach to better understanding how we think. For teachers, it’s also a well-tested strategy to help propel students towards learning connected to their own natural curiosity and cognitive abilities. When students take the reins in the classroom, studies overwhelmingly show that engagement levels rise, and learning outcomes do too.

Thinking Moves in the Classroom, CER, and NGSS

Whether you are an educator, parent, guardian, or principal – you can learn from teachers who incorporate thinking moves into their classrooms. Thinking moves help students develop a much deeper level of understanding of the topic at hand. Here’s a list of thinking moves developed by the authors of Making Things Visible (2011):

1. Observing closely and describing what’s there
2. Building explanations and interpretations
3. Reasoning with evidence
4. Making connections
5. Considering different viewpoints and perspectives
6. Capturing the heart and forming conclusions
7. Wondering and asking questions
8. Uncovering complexity and going below the surface of things

You’ve probably already noticed how well these go along with next generation science skills (NGSS). For those teaching science and engineering practices in the classroom – here’s how thinking moves align directly with STEM:

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As a science teacher for over 20 years, I’ve seen a lot of teaching strategies come and go. Today, the focus is on Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) to help prepare students to join the workforce of the future. The teaching methods required by NGSS are based on constructivism – the idea that learners actively create new knowledge and understanding based on what they already know. Concept mapping is one way to help students link new ideas to knowledge they already have.

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Did you know that the Next Generation Science Standards have applications in art?

While including the arts with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEAM) may seem counterintuitive, the fact is that at their core, STEM and art have higher order thinking in common. STEAM learning is about creativity – discovery and invention – as well as analysis, communication, and critical thinking, all of which are essential to the creation and appreciation of art.

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Understanding STEAM and the connection between art and science, technology, engineering and math is important, because the connection comes about through the exact skills that we've been talking about. Science, technology, engineering and math is problem solving and answering questions. Math is just a tool for communication. The engineering and the science, what we're talking about is the problem solving skills. We're talking about higher order skills—creating, evaluating, analyzing.

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Nationally recognized education journalist Jennifer Berkshire discusses big questions that will continue to shape the future of K-12 with KnowAtom CEO Francis Vigeant.

"We're seeing the whole conversation around testing start to shift. The conversation around the relationship between charter and district schools is going to, if not shift, get sort of more concrete and out in the open. I think that as we have this sort of bigger debate about the future, about what kind of jobs people are going to have, it's going to be impossible to talk about schools without having a more vigorous argument about what schools are supposed to be doing." -Berkshire

In this transcript of their conversation, Jennifer and Francis discuss these Five Debates:

1. What is school for?
2. Should school be about adults pulling or kids pushing?
3. What should the relationship between charter schools and traditional school districts be?
4. How should we measure school quality?
5. What is the relationship between schools and neighborhoods?

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"When we codify, we run the risk of losing innovation. That's why you see so many technical companies now hiring artists, because the opportunity to include problem solvers that potentially think differently. Innovation and creativity go hand in hand. There's no question about it. As members of society, we have a responsibility to leave the next generation better off than we found it, and I think we run the risk of losing that capacity by homogenizing and standardizing." -Dr. Stephen Immerman

KnowAtom CEO Francis Vigeant discusses the connection of art to science, technology, engineering and math in K-12 classrooms with special guest Dr. Stephen Immerman, president of Montserrat College of Art in Massachusetts. 

In this transcript of their conversation, you'll read about:

• Beyond aesthetics: What is art?

• Why STEM educators are welcoming art and calling it "STEAM"

• How art education can leverage science and engineering practices

• Where you can get involved in the national movement from STEM to STEAM

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