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Teaching Science In 3D

127 Establishing An Anchor Phenomenon Routine

December 05, 2022 • Nicole VanTassel & Erin Sadler • Season 9 • Episode 7

The anchor phenomenon routine plays an important role in science classes as students develop their abilities to figure out the questions they need to answer to meet their learning goals. In a perfect world, students work through an anchor experience, ask exactly the right questions, and all together identify and decide the most important question to investigate first... but we know these things don’t always (ever?) happen. So how can we get our students where they need to be? An anchor phenomenon routine builds student skills while navigating the learning forward. In this episode, Nicole shares her process to provide an example of what your anchor phenomenon routine might look like.

More Resources:

109 Improving Your Classroom Culture After a Break
111 Rethink Your Classroom Management Plan Now
Focusing Student Questions With Your Anchor Phenomenon Routine
(iExploreScience)
Anchor Phenomenon Example Lesson (iExploreScience)
Four Ways To Actively Engage Students With Anchor Phenomena
(iExploreScience)
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SPEAKER_00: 0:48

Welcome to the Teaching Science in 3D podcast. I'm Erin Sadler from Sadler Science. And I'm Nicole Van Tassel with iExplore Science. We're here to cut through the confusion to help science teachers like you make science relevant and engaging with student-driven instruction. We know that when students take ownership of their learning, teaching can be simple and fun. Thanks for being here, and let's dive into the episode. Hey there, this is Nicole Van Tassel with iExplore Science and thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Teaching Science in 3D podcast. So today I want to talk to you about a, or my, anchor phenomenon routine. So a lot of times we talk about like choosing your phenomenon and then like, you know, and even using it throughout the unit, I feel like we've talked about. But I get a lot of questions about like, okay, well what do I do with this phenomenon right now? How do I get my students to actually ask questions about it? what do I yeah how do I launch a unit from it so that's what we're going to dig into in this episode so I I mean first and foremost like before you can go any further you do have to craft a great anchor experience um the phenomenon that your students are engaging with um or presented with or experience it or whatever. Whatever phrasing you want to use. It has to target the content ideas that you want your students to learn. So an example I always use for this, so you may have heard it before, but I feel like I came across an example of as a phenomenon for a cells unit, there was a video of a macrophage eating a bacterium. And it was really cool to watch, for sure. But when I was thinking about it, Okay, if I'm a student and I'm watching this, like what questions am I going to ask? I'm going to ask maybe what those things are, what it's doing, why it's doing it. I might notice some like small parts or something, but am I going to ask questions about like cell organelles, which is maybe the point of your storyline. Like maybe your point of your storyline is like living things are built of cells and cells have parts that work together. And then like, you know, moving on to body systems, maybe the parts work. Is anything from that video actually going to spark any questions that get me toward that content? Unfortunately, probably not. So it's really important that our anchor phenomenon aligns with and sparks the questions that move us toward our content goals. If you're getting started with that and you want more support, I want to encourage you to check out Spark Science, of course, because there is the SOS System Foundations Formula on-demand professional development program inside of the Spark Science membership. And that will walk you through choosing a great phenomenon and developing your anchor experience. But let's say you have an anchor experience. Maybe you're using one of mine that are inside Spark Science. Maybe you have found a great one online somewhere else. Maybe your curriculum provides one. Okay, awesome. So now what do we do with this anchor phenomenon? Maybe you just came up with one on your own because that's awesome too. That's even better. But what do you do at that point? So your anchor phenomenon in any given unit is going to change. And potentially even how students experience it probably should at least sometimes get a regular refresh and mix up. There's always value to doing things the same. our students, you know, people thrive under this sense of regularity and routine. Our brain loves routine because it allows it to like take a break. In a way, you know, we have like a bazillion pieces of information we're processing and if we can put some of those on autopilot, we love that. But You know, so that's great. But at the same time, we also like novelty, right? So mixing up the way your students are engaging with a phenomenon, whether it's, you know, videos sometime, or it is a task, like a project-based kind of problem task, or, you know, maybe it's sifting through some clues and being a detective, right? All of those things mix things up. And that's great. So while the anchor experience, the phenomenon obviously would be different, the way students engage with that phenomenon can be different, is gonna change, or could change, the actual routine that our students go through should not. Because again, all those brain preference for regularity, for knowing what's expected, it allows our students to become more independent in actually doing that, those things, right? So we can, it allows us to really deepen our students' science learning. It creates that safe space for them to learn new skills because they have that regularity, they feel confident in their ability, and they can dive deeper into it. It provides practice for those skills because you're engaging your students over and over in the same asking questions or in the same skill of analyzing and interpreting data or whatever it is. And of course, it just... helps our students master those skills and go further with it each time the questions that your students ask at the beginning of the year as they move through your anchor phenomenon routine is going to be different than the questions that they ask at the end of the year as they're going through the anchor phenomenon routine because their skill in asking questions has gotten better okay so it does what does all this mean it really just means we need to establish an anchor phenomenon routine to build our students questioning skills and oftentimes scaffold the process early on, but over time, building our student competency so they are really ready to ask the questions that they need to answer in order to accomplish the learning goals and explain the anchor phenomenon. That's the end goal, that they know the questions they need to answer. They know the questions they need to move forward with. They know what's relevant, what's not relevant, what's just kind of a curiosity and what is moving them toward their goals. That's the end goal. Early on, you know, it usually starts out with like, let's just ask some questions. Anyway, so what does my routine look like? And that's what I'm going to share now. But I want you to know it doesn't, like your routine does not have to match mine. There are many different routines out there. You can Google, you can find different routines. You can manipulate it or change it, iterate on it to like, figure out what works best for you and your students. But I'm gonna just share in this episode what I typically do to launch a unit. So I guess the first thing that I do for myself is just remind myself of my actual goals for the unit. So I want my students to learn how to ask questions that get them closer to their goals. And like their goals hopefully are the science content and skills mastery. I want my students to actually ask the questions, like not just, learn how to ask the questions, I want them to ask questions. And I want them to ultimately feel a sense of ownership in the direction that our learning is moving. So that's the core of my task and that's what I keep in mind as I developed my anchor phenomenon routine. So in short, my routine is interacting with or experiencing the phenomenon through that anchor experience, moving into making observations, so that's an important step to like pause and notice, right? Moving into asking questions. Again, generating all the questions that we can. Then sorting and evaluating our questions. Figuring out what's relevant. Well, we'll get there, I guess. But sorting and evaluating. And then finally, navigating the path forward from there. Like, what comes next? How do those questions then take us into the next learning step?

UNKNOWN: 8:30

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 8:30

So experiencing the anchor phenomenon is the first step. I will just link to the blog posts that talk about what does it mean to design an anchor experience or how can our students interact with some anchor experiences. I have a blog post on that. We have a podcast episode. You can learn in depth about this inside of Spark Science and the SOS Systems Foundation formula. But basically, your students are not just presented with the phenomenon, but they are actually drawn into it. They interact with it in a way that engages them. drawing them into the story of it, that human aspect, experiencing it personally or sharing their own experiences outside of the classroom that they've had with that phenomenon, which connects to it on a more personal or emotional level. Maybe just sparking the curiosity through that, like taking on a role as a detective or taking on a role as an ecologist working in their own community, like the community connections, whatever. Lots of different ways to engage your students with the phenomenon. That comes first. And I truly believe that is like a full lesson on its own. And you'll see inside Spark Science, there is a full Anchor Experience lesson for every single Spark because it needs to truly be an experience. Our students need to be engaged with it, interacting with it, not just presented with it if we want to cultivate the type of curiosity that sustains their long-term investigation. Next though, however your students initially engage with your anchor phenomenon and while they are engaging with it, they should be spending time recording their observations and their thoughts and ideas. So I like to have students Yes, focus on the observations, like from a scientific perspective, like qualitative and quantitative observations. But I also really like to have them just have a chance to write down their ideas and their thinking. A lot of times they want to begin to explain things. And while I'm not necessarily going to encourage them all the time to do that, preliminary modeling can be a great opportunity. way to formally assess your students um and even just attract their learning i love doing preliminary modeling early and then having them come back to it throughout the unit to revise their ideas uh so you know yes sometimes i purposely have them develop an explanation but sometimes your students just have these ideas and it can just be helpful to have them almost just like get them out of their head so that they can kind of clear the space. So they're not constantly just thinking about, I wanna tell her this. They can write it down and then we can move on from there. So yeah, so I think it's really important that your students are writing down their observations and just their thinking as they are moving through the phenomenon. And the thinking can be the preliminary explanations or it can even be just the emotions that are coming up, the connections that they're making to their own life as they are going through the task, the connections that they are making to things they have learned or have read about or experienced or whatever, you know. So there's a lot of different ways that you can have your students make observations. Like if you're watching a video, recording what they see and hear. And again, all the connections. If they're reading an article, they're doing the same things. They're doing it as maybe text annotations or they are, you've given them a graphic organizer. If they're actually experiencing the phenomenon personally, maybe they're like comparing macroinvertebrates from two different streams, they can really use all of their senses to record those observations. They can be given prompts like asking them to compare and contrast. They can organize their thoughts about what they're seeing and the things that they're hearing. They can take photos or even videos with their devices. You know, we can give them a lot of different ways to log what they are seeing and thinking and feeling as they are experiencing the phenomenon. I do tend to give students a graphic organizer customized to that anchor experience that guides them through the observation process. You know, it could be a If it's a text, maybe it's an organizer with like an annotation key to support the active reading. Maybe it's a simple like notice and wonder chart. Maybe it's data tables that have some question prompts attached to it or like an organizer like a Venn diagram to make some compare and contrast. Making observations can be really hard and sometimes because it's so open-ended and there's not really a wrong way to do it, your students really freeze up because they're used to right and wrong. I try to give my students the space to record their own ideas and observations and leave it very open-ended, but also giving them some guidance and some structure to help them get started. So graphic organizers are like one of my favorite ways, things to pair with that anchor experience that gives ample amounts of freedom, but also provides some boundaries that allow your students to move forward. So then we need to move into asking questions and asking questions It comes really natural to our young learners, but by middle school, students tend to really freeze up with questions. You know, there are some different ways that you can support students asking questions. Obviously, a notice and wonder board is something that we talk about all the time. And that's basically just leaving it open-ended, like writing the things you notice. We just did that with the observations. Now let's look at those observations and create questions. Let's eye wonder. Okay, but what if your students still struggle with that? Because even that can be a challenge. One thing we can do is to focus questions on a certain thing. So we might ask students to ask, you know, identify something that surprised them and ask a question about that surprising thing. Or, you know, find something that you thought was really interesting in that experience phenomenon or whatever and i would like you to create a question about that interesting thing so we can kind of zoom in zoom their attention in or focus their attention and then have them ask a question specifically about that component we can also give prompts or like sentence stems. So I like to give my students like a list of sentence starters for questions. How did dot dot dot you know fill the blank. Why did blah blah blah. What is the relationship between blank and blank. You know give them some phrases to get started because sometimes once they get started then it starts to flow. So that's another strategy just giving actual sentence stems or like prompts or whatever that your students can use to build their questions from. If even that is a challenge, you can even just ask your students to tell me like, what do you want to learn more about? And then have them just, it could be like a simple one or two word answer. Like I want to learn more about what they eat. You know, and so they're not actually engaged in the skill of asking questions yet, but they're starting to focus on what they're curious about, which is like at the root of asking questions or is underneath asking questions. Right. So that can be another tool to help your students who are really like not even ready to ask a question. I have found that once you get students asking questions, they do get better and better and better. So if your first time going into the questioning is like a total flop and you're like, these are just know crap questions and they totally don't relate and whatever like it's okay just try again honestly the first time we did asking questions this year the one class I totally had to shut down the activity because they just started going off the wall with it it was not purposeful it was not like on task it wasn't a useful use of time at that point and we did stop the activity and we moved on and that's what it was but I came back to questioning and many other times since then and they've gotten progressively better and this last round that we just did an anchor experience in my environmental action class and it's the same students they're just like you know mixed so it's not my core science class but students that were in the core science class that had trouble were in this class and the questions they came up with were so great they were so on point it was awesome And it's only been a few months in. Again, they're still not the best at it ever, but they are definitely moving in the right direction, and some of the questions were so good that I was really, really excited. So even if it flops the first time, keep trying. Just do it again and again. Give them more and more opportunities to ask questions, and they will eventually get better at asking questions. And until they get better at asking questions, scaffold it, right? You know, give them those supports, but continue to give them the opportunity to do it. Okay, so now you have the questions they created, but what do you do with them? Now we move into the sorting and evaluating questions step. So if you've ever tried, you know, giving your students this chance to ask questions, like I said, my first round was really rough, you end up with a fair share of like totally nonsense questions or like totally irrelevant. And sometimes they're really good questions, but they're just not They're just not relevant, right? So what do we do with those? I feel like a lot of times teachers get fearful or are afraid that your students are going to ask questions that don't relate, are maybe too high level, are just not part of your unit. And they're like, well, what do I do with that? So first of all, I think it's really important that we Communicate to our students that we are accepting and validating all of the questions. Even if they aren't relevant to your unit right now, they still represent your students' curiosities and thinking, and that is wonderful. But, so we want to communicate that to our students. Like, accept all the questions. That is why when you are, if you're doing this as a whole class, which I don't necessarily recommend, you know, but, and I encourage you to check out the episode on small group learning, but if you are doing it as a whole class, write every student's question down. write every student's question down as they communicated it to you because it is important that our students see their ideas you know validated accepted written down appreciated whatever in your class that's really important but again just because they ask a question does not mean it is up to you or even the whole class like to answer it so you might find that you wanna incorporate some of their questions into independent learning tasks or challenges or projects, they can choose a question from the board and figure it out themselves. That is a great way to use those questions. But even if you don't ever use those questions, even if there are questions that are entirely unanswered at the end of your unit, That's not bad. That's okay. It's not your job to answer your students every curiosity, but it is amazing that they still have those curiosities that are outside of the scope of your learning because then they can just go, if they want to, research it on their own, figure it out on their own, be lifelong learners because that's what we all are anyway, right? So we do, you know, just because it's on the board, you don't need to answer it. And we actually want to get our students to the point of recognizing, like, I have these questions. I'm writing them down because they're important, but I'm not going to answer them. They might not all be great questions in terms of getting us to our unit's goals. And so I want to build my students' ability to recognize which questions are helpful and which questions are relevant and which questions are just like, hey, that was a really good question and a good curiosity. Maybe we could talk about it. But it's not going to be the focus of our learning in this classroom right now. So I like to have students actually evaluate the questions. And I start with what's relevant. Because I am in a public school and I have specific learning outcomes, you could always start with, like, what am I most curious about? If you have maybe an elective class where you can go in any direction you want, or you are in a school where you have less, you know, stringent content outcomes you have to get to, and you can really just follow your students' curiosities. You can change relevant to interesting at any point. But I ask my students to... to sort the questions into what is really relevant to our final end goal as communicated by like our core idea or explaining the phenomenon or solving the problem. And what questions are maybe still interesting but like not as relevant. And let's sort those to the other side of the board. And sometimes we also talk about how we can combine questions or remove repeats from the board if we have a lot of times you get questions that are repeated, right? We do that, and then we, again, discuss the questions that are going to reach our end goals. So which of those, again, relate to explaining the phenomenon or accomplishing the posed task, if it was presented as a task or a problem in the anger experience? And taking a look at those relevant questions let's start organizing them a bit more. And that's where we can start putting them into groups. Like these ones are all about the way that animals in the ecosystem are interacting. And these ones are all about the resources that animals need to survive. And these ones are all about changes we're seeing happen in the ecosystem and maybe how that impacts the other things. And so we kind of just try to create these general categories of the group of the questions. That just helps us see all of the questions a little bit more easily. And oftentimes you can kind of push those or guide those that grouping to match your storyline pathways. If you are using the pathways approach, which, um, I don't know if I have a blog. I may have a blog post somewhere about that. But I teach it in the SOS System Foundations formula inside the Spark Science membership. But this way of creating a storyline that has different pathways that your students can investigate in an attempt to make, with the end goal of making storylines a little bit more student-driven and student-responsive as opposed to the teacher having planned out the entire storyline step-by-step. So pathways are kind of this balance between that teacher- guided, driven, outlined approach to a storyline and like fully just setting your students free to just investigate whatever they want because that doesn't really work as well in a public education setting. So we have our groups and now we need to figure out where do we go from here and this is where we are navigating our path forward. So we look at those questions, we look at the relevant questions and and potentially they've been broken into pathways or at least groups of investigation, areas of investigation. We talk about what is our first best step. And how we approach that can be different. Sometimes it can be tied to what your students are most curious about. Like in an investigation into maybe the water quality of our local stream, I don't necessarily care which water quality factor we start digging into first or which aspect of the water quality, like whether it's the physical characteristics of the stream or if it's like the actual chemistry of the stream or maybe it's like the macroinvertebrate and like the ecosystem health of the stream. it doesn't matter to me where we start. So maybe it's where I'm seeing more questions coming into. Likewise, you know, if I'm thinking about maybe factors that impact climate, I don't care if we start with like the impact of mountains or we dig into like the relationship between nearness to bodies of water on climate, right? It doesn't matter. So maybe that in those situations, we're allowing our students' curiosities and interests to guide that first best step. On the other hand, maybe the first best step is tied to a part of a task that was posed in our anchor experience. In endangered genomes, koalas at risk, students are given this grant writing prompt, and so maybe it's less, and that's, The grant writing prompt kind of poses the structure for the unit. Like we need to figure out these things to put into our grant. So it really guides where we go with the unit. So maybe we're focusing less on like where we're most curious and what we're wondering and maybe we're focusing more on like to complete this section of the grant, we need to find this information and we're going to start there. You know, every anchor experience is different and you can kind of customize how you navigate what comes first. But we're really using the boundaries that we establish in our anchor experience to like evaluate the questions and figure out where to start. And sometimes it's like we just need this basic knowledge. So I always try to encourage students to think about, okay, you have these questions. Is there anything we need to know or understand before we can answer this question? And you might start to see students ask questions about, you know, like I always think of living and nonliving and things like that, when you think of cells, you know, before we can maybe understand why or how viruses invade cells, maybe we kind of need to iron out what cells are. And like their relationship to this idea of living things. So that's the kind of discussions you can have with students to figure out, is there anything we need to know before we can answer your questions? And that can potentially be your first step. But again, every anger experience is just different and you kind of have to figure out where you're gonna go with it, but it's really important that our students start thinking about and talking about and doing the navigating with you, because if you think about it in the long run, they are going to be, they're going to run into problems. They're going to have learning that they need to do and they need to know how to ask the questions and they need to know how to then go about answering their questions, like where to start, right? That is just a skill our students need to have and we can really build their independence and empower them in the classroom doing this in this very safe space. Working through this whole experience, this anger phenomenon routine is hard. And I just want to reiterate that it's hard as a teacher in releasing freedom, but also figuring out how to keep your students kind of reined in and moving forward. And it's also hard for students because it really asks them to step up in ways they haven't in the past. And it engages them in a lot of skills that they may not, you know, oftentimes students are answering the questions, they're not asking them, right? So... You often will see them struggle through this process the first time, if not the first several times. You might see behavior issues arise. Like I said, I had to shut it down the first activity. We started it. It was not going well. We pivoted, did something else, and we came back to this attempt again later. Because they're really messing around to avoid that confusion and that struggle. I mean, that's what it comes down to. It's probably going to be hard the first time you work through an anchor phenomenon routine. And I just want to kind of like set that expectation, I guess. I read in this parenting book one time or something about how our expectations can really influence how we feel at the end of an activity. Like when we have a exciting day planned with our kids. We're going to go fly kites. We're going to go to the beach and have a picnic. It's going to be like this picture book experience. And then your kids do what kids do. And they have meltdowns because the kite won't fly. And they get sand in their peanut butter and jelly. And they squirt apple sauce all over their brother. And that is just what happens. And when we go into it thinking we're going to have this most amazing day and make all these great memories, we feel so defeated at the end. But when we just go into it being like, it's probably going to be a, not allowed to say that word, show. And that's probably what's going to happen. And it's, you know, that's just what it is. But we're going to just enjoy the parts that we can. We can feel happy about the things that did go well at the end of the day. So. having those expectations, like it's probably gonna be hard, it's probably gonna be a mess, but we're gonna get through it and the next time it's gonna be a little bit better and I'm gonna celebrate the small little parts that did go well. The first time you do it, just try to keep that mindset. If you have to pivot, if you have to end the activity early, if you have to eliminate the parts, it's okay. If you have to give your students the questions at the end of the activity, that's okay. The important thing is that we keep trying, we keep, We figure out ways that we can scaffold tasks and support our students through them, but we keep giving them the opportunity again and again to build these skills and competencies. Eventually our students are going to step up and eventually our students will develop those skills and competencies, but they will never develop them if we don't give them a chance to do it. So that's the flip side of it. It is a task worth doing. It's a task worth accomplishing. It's a skill our students need. in our classrooms and beyond. And you have an opportunity here to do something to help your students, whether they ever pursue science or not. This is a lifelong skill. So the anchor phenomenon routine, it's rough at first, but it is so worth it. And I just want to encourage you to explore how you can incorporate you know, this anchor phenomenon routine or like whatever yours is going to look like into your class consistently to both make launching your student-driven storylines easier over time, but also to give your students an opportunity to practice these skills. Thanks so much for tuning in today. I hope you found this episode helpful. Please reach out anytime. And if you are enjoying the podcast, please leave us a review. It really helps, I don't know, the computers like that. the algorithms or whatever. The computers like it when people leave reviews. So if you're enjoying the podcast, please leave us a good review and it will help other people find our podcast. I will catch you guys later. Have a good rest of your week.