Balancing Responsiveness and Rigor in High-School Science Classrooms

Balancing Responsiveness and Rigor in High-School Science Classrooms

The summary below comes from issue #642 of The Marshall Memo (www.marshallmemo.com), an EXCELLENT resource for educattors

In this Teachers College Record article, Jessica Thompson, Carolyn Colley, and Mark Windschitl (University of Washington/Seattle), Sara Hagenah (Boise State University), Hosun Kang (University of California/Irvine), David Stroupe (Michigan State University), and Melissa Braaten (University of Wisconsin/Madison) start with a striking research finding: only about 13 percent of elementary and secondary math and science lessons are both responsive and rigorous – that is, respectful of students’ ideas while also teaching the required curriculum. “Our theory of action for rigorous and responsive teaching in classrooms,” say the authors, “rests on the assumption that teaching is fundamentally about setting intellectually meaningful learning goals and then creating opportunities for students to learn through mediated action… Rigorous curriculum is necessary but not sufficient for ambitious and equitable science learning experiences… [H]igh levels of rigor cannot be attained in classrooms where teachers are unresponsive to students’ ideas or puzzlements.”

The tendency that Thompson and her colleagues observed in the secondary science classrooms they observed was that teachers either acted as the sage on the stage, dispensing science knowledge for students to memorize and regurgitate, or “elicited students’ ideas, opening up a range of possible ideas for consideration, but then narrowed the set of possible ideas to the correct science idea by the end of the class period, doing little to support subsequent sense-making.” Why? In both cases, it was because teachers wanted to keep their classroom under reasonable control and cover the curriculum. These two concerns acted as “sink stoppers” on the flow of ideas in classrooms, say the authors, preventing the ideal balance of curriculum coverage and student participation.

The very small number of teachers who were successful in combining rigor and responsiveness did three things: (a) Responding to and building on students’ science ideas and getting them talking in whole-class and small-group settings; (b) Encouraging participation in a learning community and reinforcing classroom norms; and (c) Eliciting and incorporating students’ lived experiences to build vivid scientific stories. An example of the third was a student telling the class that his family’s dog got sick, the vet’s blood tests found the dog was 15-20 percent wolf, and the dog had to be put down. This story became a shared problem that the class worked on for three weeks in the context of genetic variations among dogs.

             The secret sauce, say the authors, is for teachers to orchestrate or seize upon teachable moments, in any part of the lesson, have students juxtapose their first-hand experiences with known scientific ideas and concepts, and talk ideas through in a supportive classroom environment. “In the small fraction of lessons we coded as highly rigorous and responsive,” say Thompson and her colleagues, “students authored and owned scientific explanations while carefully listening and building on the ideas of others. Both teachers and students regularly engaged in in-the-moment sense-making and focused on synthesizing knowledge. Multiple students’ ideas were framed as legitimate resources that helped the whole class make progress on canonical science understandings, even as the science was localized in students’ experiences. Scientific knowledge was treated as partial and under constant revision. This allowed for a hybrid form of epistemic authority that combined canonical science knowledge with students’ locally authored science ideas. The result was shared scientific understandings that were made public, challenged, and revised until well-warranted.”

            Why did so few lessons successfully balance student voice and curriculum rigor? The authors believe it’s because of the perennial difficulty of juggling four classroom dilemmas:

-   How much to privilege canonical science knowledge? When there was too much of a gap between curriculum content and students’ ideas and misconceptions, teachers tended to revert to the Initiate-Respond-Evaluate pattern to keep students on track and move the lesson along.

-   How much to build on ideas from previous lessons? In the most effective classrooms, teachers jotted students’ ideas on easel sheets, posted them on the wall, and were able to quickly point out connections from previous lessons.

-   How many students should take part in a discussion before moving on or layering on the “correct” information? In the best lessons, there was less concern about the number of students participating than the quality of responses and the whole class putting together a good understanding of the topic.

-   How to legitimately use students’ lived experience and language to shape instruction? This was the biggest challenge for teachers, with fewer than 3 percent successfully incorporating real-life stories into lessons. Most of the time, teachers borrowed language from students’ stories and incorporated it into teacher-centered explanations. “By coopting students’ language and experiences in this manner,” say the authors, “teachers preserved their own storyline for science and marginalized student contributions by treating them as tokens.”

“How teachers and students navigated these in-the-moment dilemmas – or not – helps explain the full range of more or less successful intertwining of rigor and responsiveness in our data set,” conclude Thompson et al. In the most successful lessons, students did the intellectual heavy lifting, with the teacher skillfully orchestrating the process and keeping the focus on the big ideas students needed to learn – in their own way. “Thus, the rigorous and responsive classrooms became places where students’ lives framed the community’s science work.”

“Rigor and Responsiveness in Classroom Activity” by Jessica Thompson, Sara Hagenah, Hosun Kang, David Stroupe, Melissa Braaten, Carolyn Colley, and Mark Windschitl in Teachers College Record, May 2016 (Vol. 118, #5, p. 1-58),

https://tcrecord.org/library/abstract.asp?contentid=19366; Thompson can be reached at jjthomps@uw.edu.