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.
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.