Intro to Chemistry, Grade 10

Will Brown’s Oakland high school students are profoundly inexperienced readers. But their teacher invites them to learn about acids and bases by asking questions, making connections, and noticing where the reading gets sticky. Then they problem solve.

As Lisa Krebs introduces her 9th graders to To Kill a Mockingbird, she also introduces them to the concept of schema. Students develop the notion that they all have schema from what they have learned and lived to help them solve reading problems.

Richard Abdelkerim wants his Precalculus students to engage on a conceptual level even with procedure-oriented topics. In this session, students collaborate to assemble their understanding of why (not just how) they might use row echelon form to solve a system of equations.

Many of the students in Gayle Cribb’s honors class are English learners or former English learners. All of them do the work of historians by grappling with primary sources, making text-based arguments, and helping each other think through reading challenges.

The students in Lilit Haroyan’s General Physics class are accustomed to surfacing their confusion. Their instructor asks them to use one another and their texts as resources to make sense of physics concepts. As they do so, they engage the scientific literacy practice of using texts, diagrams, and equations to understand a concept.

Shelagh Rose’s First Year Seminar students engage in Think Aloud to begin reading an academic, peer-reviewed article. They are learning to leverage their own and their peers’ prior knowledge, and to actively problem solve with academic texts. Ultimately, they are empowered to bring their own perspectives, questions, and concerns to college coursework.