“High-leverage” practices for teachers

Big What is it about the topic

[earthquakes, optics, inheritance, or acids and bases] that is so important?”

Is it the topic that is important? Or is it something more fundamental and dynamic about the topic that my students should really understand?

They focus your planning They focus your planning on important goals They help you plan for assessment They help you make all your instructional activities

hang together for kids

Big ideas– why are they important?

Instructional activities cohering around a BI

Activities without a BI

Do you have questions that have to be resolved before we talk about cases?

Janet’s & Brian’s cases: teaching about fungi and sound

Reproduction

Cellular Respiration

Digestion

Decomposition

What did you initially write down as your “big ideas” around fungi or sound? How did Janet or Brian talk about big ideas in the video? What are 2 observations and a question you have about the intellectual work (priming) that Janet and Brian are doing to prepare for teaching?

Curricula/textbooks are rarely about big ideas In kits? The big ideas get lost in the slew of activities

that are presented In textbooks? Encyclopedic tidal wave of information

and vocabulary You have to construct Big Ideas

Common curricula are not sacred things

Do a quick survey of the chapter titles, note which seem to be tangible “things”, topics or themes, theories, or processes.

Look in these curricula

Now use page 8 in your Big Idea tool to guide you in constructing a big idea out of the topic “The Respiration and Circulatory System”

Puzzling phenomena

Explanatory model

The big idea

Now use your Big Idea as a lens to make judgments about activities in a curriculum

Pick one, start thinking about it on the bus◦Homeostasis◦Newton’s Laws◦The Gas Laws◦Earthquakes

Your “topics” for micro-teaching: Start thinking about how to construct big ideas from these