Stone – Teaching Elementary School Science The learning cycle is a student-centered INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGY designed to increase student understanding of science concepts, while enhancing important science practices (skills). Phase Critical Attributes ● The goal is to spark interest and involvement and to get kids thinking. ● An object, event, video clip, demonstration, problem, challenge or question is used to engage students. ● Connections are facilitated between what students know and can do through interesting questions posed by the teacher. Engage ● Teacher questions help to focus the learners’ attention on the tasks that will follow and call up knowledge kids already have. ● New words and concepts are NEVER used or introduced in Engage ● Must be a good attention grabber. ____________________________________________________________________ ● Objects and phenomena are explored through hands-on activities in which parameters (variables) can be manipulated by learners without providing step-by-step instructions. ● Should be somewhat open-ended and tied to the Engage. ● The hands-on materials allow students to build relevant experiences with the target concept Explore ● Begins and/or ends with carefully crafted teacher questioning. ● Sharing and communication with other learners should be encouraged during this stage. ● New words and concepts are NEVER used or introduced in Explore. _____________________________________________________________________ ● New concepts, vocabulary & skills are introduced for the first time and consciously tied to the experiences students gained during exploration. The teacher may choose to introduce explanations, definitions, mediate discussions or simply facilitate by helping learners find the words needed. ● The focus at this stage is on the new concepts and terms and helping students build understanding. ● The learner is encouraged to put observations, questions, hypotheses and experiences from Explain the previous stages into language using vocabulary introduced by the teacher, through reading or through other means. ● Communication between learners and learner groups can spur this process. Students are now involved in an analysis of what they did in the exploration phase. ● Teacher creates opportunities for students to gain some practice understanding the terms before moving on to Elaborate. ____________________________________________________________________ ● Uses hands-on activities which allow students to apply concepts in contexts to build on or extend understanding of all new concepts and terms introduced in Explain. ● Inferences, deductions, and hypotheses can be applied to similar or real-world situations. Varied examples and applications of concepts learned strengthen mental models and Elaborate provide further insight and understanding. ● This section gives students the opportunity to expand and solidify their understanding of the concept and/or apply it to a real world situation _____________________________________________________________________ ● Should involve active engagement by students, in many cases more hands-on opportunities. ● Evaluation activities permit evaluation of student development and lesson effectiveness in Evaluate order to determine that learning objectives have been met and misconceptions avoided. ● Should include rubrics, checklists, interviews, observation or other evaluation tools.