Listening and speaking
Listening and speaking are essential to participating in science activities and communities. Amplify Science thus provides many authentic opportunities for talking and listening as students refine their thinking and communicate their ideas to various audiences. Throughout the Amplify Science curriculum, students use discussion to construct explanations and join in oral argumentation. For example, students discuss evidence in order to understand it and to work together to determine what claim the evidence supports. As students discuss, they are practicing vital aspects of constructing explanations and argumentation, such as deeply understanding evidence, working with others to understand the meaning of evidence, convincing others, and providing logical reasoning. Oral language and discussion is further supported across the grades through discourse routines such as Shared Listening, Think-Pair-Share, and Word Relationships, and through organized discussions such as Evidence Circles. See below for more details.
Oral and written language in K-1
Young children are simultaneously developing language and learning through language. Oral language development is therefore an important consideration when planning learning experiences about aspects of the world that young children are just encountering. The Amplify Science approach to oral language is connected to writing, and considers the trajectory of students’ expressive language and vocabulary development.
The oral language built across the kindergarten and grade 1 units helps students develop language that facilitates their learning of challenging concepts and supports them in explaining their learning to others (both orally and through writing). Over the course of the kindergarten and grade 1 units, students participate in class discussions and are supported in learning how to converse with each other, to agree or disagree, and to build on their peers’ science ideas. This oral language build links explanation language common in science to authentic learning contexts, and it builds children’s facility with causal language across the units of study. Following the Gradual Release of Responsibility Model, the Explanation Language Frame expands in complexity throughout a unit, scaffolding students’ acquisition of scientific ways of speaking and thinking.
Amplify Science units provide ample opportunities to compose and record ideas through talking, drawing, and writing text. At times the focus remains solely on talking and listening, with the teacher and students orally composing sentences and ideas. At other times the teacher takes the lead on both oral composition and the recording of written text. Still other times, the students help orally compose the ideas and language of the text while the teacher records the words. Finally, students sometimes take responsibility for oral composition and recording of ideas through illustrations or emergent and beginning writing.
Listening and speaking in grades 2–5
In grades 2–5, the Amplify Science units provide numerous opportunities for students to engage in both formal and informal discussion. These discussion opportunities surface in each lesson as students listen and share ideas in partner, small-group, and whole-class configurations. At this grade band, many activities are completed in pairs or groups of four. Structured prompts are provided for students to discuss their thinking with partners at various stages of the activities. Partner reading of each student book in the unit provides a particularly rich opportunity for students to exchange ideas about the key science and engineering content and practices they encounter. Following the partner and small-group work, students come back together as a class to discuss their developing understanding.
In addition to the discussion opportunities embedded throughout the hands-on and reading activities, discourse routines provide students with structured opportunities to develop their oral language skills in conjunction with their growing science understanding. For example, the Inheritance and Traits unit features the Thought Swap routine. This routine invites each student in a pair to explain themselves clearly to a partner, to carefully listen to the ideas shared by the partner, and to share their own or their partner’s ideas with the class. Students then rotate partners and repeat the process with a new partner and prompt. This and other discourse routines employed in the grades 2–5 units support all students with expressing their thinking, as well as learning to listen carefully and respectfully to their peers.
Listening and speaking in grades 6-8
The Amplify Science middle school units are replete with opportunities for student talk, which is embedded in virtually every activity. For instance, when students engage in activities such as completing a mission using the unit’s Simulation, or collecting data with a hands-on activity, they are always prompted to discuss their thinking with a partner or small group. After reading an article, students routinely discuss their impressions of what they read with a partner, and use this discussion to help them clarify their thinking about any confounding ideas they encountered during reading. Afterwards, students engage in a whole-class discussion of the article in order to help everyone in the classroom to better understand it.
In addition to less formal discussion opportunities, students participate in discourse routines that are more structured. For example, each middle school unit introduces either the Write and Share or the Word Relationships discourse routine. These routines are enacted in small groups of 3–4 students. For the Write and Share routine, each member of the group is given a different piece of evidence to interpret independently. They take notes and write about their evidence, then come together with their small group to share and discuss their evidence. The evidence is conceived of so that each piece is necessary to understanding a larger content idea; thus, as they discuss, students learn from each other and come to conclusions about what each piece means when interpreted together. For the Word Relationships routine, students are provided with an abbreviated set of essential vocabulary words from the unit as well as a question (or two) that they must answer using those words. Students discuss how the words they are working with can be used to answer the question(s), then share their responses with the class. Both the Write and Share and Word Relationships routines provide focused and structured ways for students to discuss content.
Finally, each core unit includes a capstone discussion routine that all students participate in: the Science Seminar. The Science Seminar routine asks students to come together as a class and discuss a set of evidence they have been considering in preceding activities. To prepare for this whole-class, end-of-unit discussion, students spend 1–2 lessons reading and discussing evidence with a partner. On the day of the Seminar, students are responsible for the discussion, while the teacher is asked to take a supporting and guiding role rather than one of leadership. This discourse opportunity gives students tremendous agency in thinking about content and evidence in order to make convincing oral arguments.