Learning Science Through Inquiry: What Is Inquiry and Why Do It?
This introductory workshop presents an overview of why inquiry is such a powerful approach to teaching and learning science-how it enables you to assess and meet the needs of a wide range of learners, how it taps children's natural curiosity, and how it deepens their understanding of science.
Learning Science Through Inquiry: Setting the Stage - Creating a Learning Community
At the heart of inquiry teaching and learning is a positive environment that encourages and supports students on their learning paths. This course looks at what is needed for building that foundation and preparing your students for inquiry investigations.
Learning Science Through Inquiry: The Process Begins - Launching the Inquiry
To inquire into specific scientific phenomena, students need to draw upon a foundation of experience. This course shows how you can encourage students to share and discuss what they already know, and to explore the materials and phenomena in an open-ended manner.
Learning Science Through Inquiry: Focus the Inquiry - Designing the Exploration
Students' open exploration leads to a range of interests and questions that lead in turn to deeper investigation. This course looks at the design process-how you can guide students to plan and begin their investigations.
Learning Science Through Inquiry: Processing for Meaning During Inquiry
Making meaning from investigations and experience requires that you guide student dialogue, encouraging your students to make connections, draw conclusions, and ask new questions. This course looks at the rationale for this kind of processing, and strategies that can help students construct new mental frameworks.
Learning Science Through Inquiry: Assessing Inquiry
Assessment is an ongoing process in the classroom. This course looks at a variety of assessment strategies that range from the very informal formative assessments to formal summative assessments, and explores the purposes each can serve.
Learning Science Through Inquiry: Connecting Other Subjects to Inquiry
This course explores how to use subjects like mathematics and language to further scientific inquiry and understanding of science concepts, and conversely, how science can aid learning in other subjects. It also reiterates the benefits of learning science through inquiry and explores your "next steps" along the inquiry journey.
Essential Science for Teachers: Physical Science - Properties and Classification of Matter
Matter is all around us--it's what we are made of. Yet how do we define matter? What are the properties of matter that set it apart from something that is definitely not matter, like light? This workshop was produced by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. It is designed to help K-6 science teachers gain an understanding of such bedrock science concepts relevant to our modern standards-based curricula. Workshop participants build a working definition of matter, distinguish among the different forms it can take, investigate the differences between "essential" and "accidental" properties of matter, and explore the role of classification in science.
Essential Science for Teachers: Physical Science - The Particle Nature of Matter: Solids, Liquids, and Gases
What simple idea links together all of chemistry and physics? How can a close study of the macroscopic differences among solids, liquids, and gases support a microscopic model of tiny, discrete, and constantly moving particles? In this session, participants learn how the "particle model" can be turned into a powerful tool for generating predictions about the behavior of matter under a wide range of conditions.
Essential Science for Teachers: Physical Science - Physical Changes and Conservation of Matter
What happens when sugar is dissolved in a glass of water or when a pot of water on the stove boils away? Do things ever really "disappear"? In everyday life, observations that things "disappear" or "appear" seem to contradict one of the fundamental laws of nature: matter can be neither created nor destroyed. In this session, participants learn how the principles of the particle model are consistent with conservation of matter.