A key tenet of our approach to model-based reasoning is "student agency". We place students and their thinking at the center of the classroom. We want students to build knowledge in an environment that provides them with opportunities to grapple with observations, data, and patterns and that creates a space for them to generate, evaluate and re-create their explanatory ideas. A big piece of this process is making their ideas—and their revised ideas—visible.
There are a number of ways to highlight student thinking as you develop models. A simple way is to record the ideas students offer in a public, visible space. Some teachers choose to enter student ideas directly into PowerPoint, and others choose to write on poster paper. Paper holds the advantage of being more permanently available to students: a list of ideas on a PowerPoint will not be visible once you move along to the next slide. An electronic medium (such as a PowerPoint presentation) holds the advantage of easy revision—both on-the-fly and when returning to the model ideas. Some teachers have navigated around the seeming disadvantages of paper by creating more than one poster per model: a first poster for "initial ideas" and later a separate poster for "revised ideas" or even a "summary poster". Other teachers have found ways to easily return to electronic lists at various points during sense-making, but here it is often true that the teacher still controls when students have access to the ideas.
You will come up with creative solutions to these challenges. As you do, please keep in mind a few potentially useful guiding principles:
1. If we are asking students to build knowledge, we are responsible for making sure they have the tools they need to consider, revise and apply ideas that have been offered in the classroom.
2. When asking students to make sense of their world, we cannot predict which ideas and models they might connect to the phenomenon at hand. A classroom rich with publicly available ideas is more likely to generate creative connections and novel ways of approaching a problem or pattern.
3. Making student ideas visible, and reminding students of their genuine ability to do the work of science (noticing, generating explanations, testing and revising those explanatory ideas, etc.) can motivate them to do the work of sense-making.
As you come up with your own ways to make student thinking visible in the classroom, be sure to post to the Forum