Session 8 at a Glance

The goal for session 8 is to focus on the formative assessment enactment model. Teachers revisit the formative assessment enactment model and reflect upon its versatility and value for classroom use. This session uses videos of student discourse to help participants grapple with the critical aspects of the Formative Assessment Enactment Model. Participants explore a spectrum of teacher decision-making in the moment with regard to questioning students. Participants examine and analyze the following:  eliciting moves;  how to narrow or open up student responses; advancing moves; and whether to use directing or responding questions. 

Session objectives

In session 8, teachers will:

• Develop a chemical thinking perspective that views the discipline as addressing problems that chemistry allows us to answer, and interprets curriculum toward positioning students to use their chemistry knowledge in the real world.
• Strengthen the ability to plan for learning about a student's chemical thinking using formative assessments that elicit students’ ideas, particularly focusing on the nature of questions.

Participant Agenda: 

1. Welcome & Introduction 
2. Discussion: Ambitious Science Teaching video & reading 
3. Videos & Discussion: Deeper dive into teacher eliciting moves: opening or narrowing 
4. Break 
5. Videos & Discussion: Deeper dive into teacher advancing moves: directing or responding

Materials

Full download (zipped folder)

ACCT Program components focused on in this session

Chemical Thinking Thread: Chemical Identity

Formative Assessment Enactment Model: Eliciting and Advancing

Teacher Dilemmas: Pedagogical Dilemma

Tips for the facilitator

Teachers analyze classroom videos in which all of the teachers are using formative assessment tasks that reveal students’ thinking about chemical identity. One video has a balance of eliciting and advancing moves. Two of the videos present contrasts of directive vs. responsive advancing moves. The major goal of this session is to support teachers in recognizing the difference between eliciting moves (finding out more about how students are thinking) and advancing moves (moving students toward the scientific story).
This session also gives teachers opportunities to look for thinking about chemical identity. Each video is of a classroom in which students are discussing chemical identity questions about how to know whether a substance is a particular kind of substance (a classification question), and how to tell whether two different substances are the same or different (a differentiation question). Students have many different ways to make sense of chemical identity. These include: (1) focusing on how substances do or do not change, (2) placing substances into different classes which allows assigning properties to the substance of other substances in a class, (3) using the composition or structure to determine identity, (4) basing identity on the function or use of a substance, (5) telling what substance it is by its effect on organisms, (6) using sensory information to identify a substance, such as color or odor, (7) figuring out what it is by the source where it comes from, and (8) running tests to determine its (intrinsic) properties. All of these are valid in chemistry, and they are useful under different circumstances.