Building on Norms to Support Sociocultural Understandings
Supporting Community Norms
In order to develop the participants’ knowledge in the Environmental Art session, we are going to need to know how to navigate our understandings of academic, social, cultural, and societal content.
One way that I will support the students’ ability to think through these dimensions of learning happening within the Environmental Art session is introducing “talk moves” by providing sentence/question stems for argumentation and discourse. The concept of talk moves is informed by Ambitious Science Teaching, and specifically the taxonomy chart from Figure 3.2. There are many talk moves I feel are important to use for teaching any content or concept. For the scope of the Environmental Art session, I will be supporting explicit knowledge of one explicit talk move and one implicit move.
One of the talk moves I will be having the group implicitly practice is called wait time. This idea was mentioned above in the Community Norms section above, and means that there is a certain amount of time expected in between when the someone, often the instructor, asks a question and there is a response and/or answer to that question. Wait time is important as it gives participants time to think and process, as well as to help the answers and responses that follow become more thoughtful (Windschitl, Thompson & Braaten 2018). Another talk move we will explicitly practice during the session is called probing, which I will explain further below.
Probing refers to the act of making observations and/or ideas public and can be used with relevant out-of-school experiences that the participants may have had before. When the probing is used, it is necessary that no one is evaluating or judging the ideas, observations, or understandings that are coming up (Windschitl, Thompson & Braaten 2018 p. 54, 63, 80). There are many ways to ask a probing question that will help facilitate learning. As inspired by Figure 4.3 of Ambitious Science Teaching, the probing questions I will have visible and will go over during the session include:
What made you think that…
Why did you think…
How did you…
What could we learn from…
Do you think it’s important that…
These sentence/question starters are helpful for scaffolding the participants’ ability to engage in conversations that will elicit ideas and also push the ideas that are shared into deepening and expanding the information, ideas, and understandings that are coming up. As the facilitator of the session, I will also add some prompts to further add to the probing, such as:
I agree with you, and I also think…
I agree with you, and couldn’t you add…
I agree with you because…
I know where you’re coming from, but I have a different idea…
I disagree with that idea because…
I think you’re headed in the right direction, but…
What do you mean by…
What makes you think that…
Could you be more specific…
Much like the probing questions above, these additions will help students become familiar with whole-group discussions and argumentations, where the group will be in an environment where critiquing, adding onto, and engaging with other ideas, questions, and understandings is expected and normed (Windschitl, Thompson & Braaten 2018, p.79-80). These talk moves will be used throughout the session and in different sections of the curriculum presented. The curriculum that I will be establishing within the Environmental Art session features best practices for education such as the use of objectives, concepts, and methodologies. Throughout the next sections, I will explain the curricular foundations of the Environmental Art session.
I am using Figure 3.2 and 4.3 from Ambitious Science Teaching to inform the Supporting Community Norms above
