Classroom Practice

A classroom study was conducted to understand how to engage in responsive teaching with 18 seventh grade students at three stages of units coordination during a unit on proportional reasoning co-taught by the first author and classroom teacher. In the unit, students worked on making two cars travel the same speed. Students at all three stages of units coordination learned to do so, as reported elsewhere (Hackenberg et al., 2023). This paper focuses on the practice of inquiring responsively in small groups.

In this study, we used Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) to represent data generated by Natural Language Processing (NLP) analytics during an activity based on the Knowledge Integration (KI) framework. The activity features a web-based adaptive dialog about energy transfer in photosynthesis and cellular respiration. Students write an initial explanation, respond to two adaptive prompts in the dialog, and write a revised explanation. The NLP models score the KI level of the initial and revised explanations. They also detect the ideas in the explanations and the dialog responses.

In this article, we describe how we use classroom phenomena to help fifth grade students develop testable questions and productive investigations. Engaging students in observing and seeking to explain a classroom decomposition chamber has helped them to engage more successfully in the science and engineering practices (SEPs) of asking questions, planning and carrying out investigations, and constructing explanations.

Despite a growing effort to integrate students’ civic action projects into science and engineering curricula that address climate change and environmental justice, there are few frameworks that guide teachers and students to make well-informed decisions and actions towards a more just and sustainable future. This article presents a tool, Civic Action Matrix, that characterizes different types of students’ civic action projects.

Although there has been increasing attention to the importance of teacher agency in professional development, there has been little attention to what it takes to facilitate collaborative work that both centers teachers’ assets and expertise and leads to productive learning. This paper presents a framework for focused and responsive facilitation of productive discourse around instructional practice in teacher learning communities.

We explored how various contextual resources accumulated over multiple years operated together to facilitate a team of high school teachers' sustained and agentive learning after a 4-year research–practice partnership (RPP) grant concluded. Specifically, we examined constellations of resources that promoted the co-evolution of the teachers' collective inquiry in the professional learning community (PLC) and classroom instruction, focused on supporting students' scientific explanations.

This article presents a tool that teachers can use to support children in planning science investigations. Using an extended example from a second-grade investigation into seed dispersal, we describe strategies for structuring conversations that anchor investigations in phenomena and provide opportunities for students to be involved in making decisions about what materials to use in an investigation, how to use materials, and what to look for or count as evidence.

Seeds of Algebraic Thinking are sub-conceptual resources coming from life experience that students call upon when responding to mathematical prompts. This site includes resources students could activate when thinking about groups and sets, equality, proportionality and ratio reasoning, and functions.

In conversations about pedagogy, researchers often overlook how physical space and movement shape teacher sensemaking. This article offers a comparative case study of classroom videos using a dynamic visual method to map embodied interaction called “interaction geography.” Our analysis proposes an integrative framework to study classroom interactions and teacher movement over space and time comprised of four salient characteristics within lessons: trails, landmarks, material routines, and circulation patterns.