It is always a thrill to meet the authors who have written the articles in Science and Children that I’ve found so helpful, and useful enough to share. At the Elementary Extravaganza event at the 2016 NSTA national conference in Nashville I met Joseph Robinson, author of “How We Know What We Know: Cultivating scientific reasoning among preschool students with cars and ramps” (January 2016). Judith Lederman, author and co-author of several articles about the Nature of Science, was also in the house! They were just two of the many science educators who contribute to Science and Children and the other NSTA journals.

I share my copy of the journal with colleagues at the program where I teach and recommend specific articles to others. You can do the same! Have you been introduced to the NSTA Learning Center? It is an online center for finding all kinds of resources:

• Audio & Video
• Books & Chapters
• Events (In-Person)
• Forums
• Do-It-Yourself Learning
• Journal Articles & Lesson Plans
• Online Course Providers
• Online Events & Courses
• Web Seminars by Sponsor
• Browse Articles by Journal

And you can search by keyword and author! Professors at over 90 colleges and universities across the United States and Canada are using NSTA resources and the NSTA Learning Center as their online textbook when teaching science pre-service teachers. You can learn how through the archived webinar, “The NSTA Learning Center: A Tool to Develop Science Pre-Service Teachers.”

Webinars are a good way to get an introduction to the more than 12,000 resources of the Learning Center. Webinars are archived after they happen live so you can access them at a later time or again. Here are two—one that is coming up and one that you can find in the archives. 

Web Seminar: The NSTA Learning Center: Personalized Professional Learning in Collaboration with Other Colleagues, May 12, 2016: Join us for this interactive web seminar to get a detailed look at the Learning Center and discover its resources and professional learning tools that you can begin using immediately. 
This program is designed for educators of grades K–12, especially those who are new to the Learning Center. All participants will receive a certificate of participation and 100 Learning Center activity points for attending and completing the end-of-program evaluation. An archive and related PowerPoint presentation will be available at the end of the program. 

Web Seminar: The NSTA Learning Center: A Tool to Develop Science Pre-Service Teachers, April 28, 2016: Professors at over 90 colleges and universities across the United States and Canada are using NSTA resources and the NSTA Learning Center as their online textbook when teaching science pre-service teachers. Join us on Thursday, April 28, to learn how you can create a blended learning experience for the teacher candidates you teach by leveraging NSTA resources with the Learning Center’s online community. This web seminar is designed for professors who teach science pre-service teachers at universities and colleges. All participants will receive a certificate of participation and 100 Learning Center activity points for attending and completing the post-seminar evaluation. An archive and presentation slides will be available at the end of the program.

When you search for resources, you can filter your search with choices in Grade Level, Price, Subject, Type or Format, and Collections and Conference Materials. You can save your finds in your “My Library” and make collections to share with others. Let us know when you have a collection to share!

I’m looking for suggestions on how to have class discussions that are meaningful and help students with our learning goals, especially discussing current events or the results of our investigations. Sometimes it goes off-topic or students don’t listen to one another. —C., Virginia

Being able to discuss issues and ideas in a productive manner is important to the future endeavors of your students. Discussions, whether in small or large groups, can be used to focus and share student thinking in terms of summarizing, questioning, comparing/contrasting, making claims and arguments, brainstorming, decision making, and problem solving.

We may think students should know how to do this. But students may come with misconceptions about discussions. They may be used to the idea that a “discussion” means that the teacher asks questions and they respond. This teacher-led interrogation does not include student-to-student questions or in-depth conversations. Or consider what passes for “discussions” on television, where people shout, interrupt, ridicule, and engage in name-calling and other disrespectful and unproductive behaviors (not behaviors we want to encourage or reinforce in our classrooms!).

You may have realized you have to teach students to work cooperatively, take notes in a style related to the task, write informatively, and read science text. So it follows that students may need to learn how to discuss issues and ideas among themselves. As students mature, their interactions should change and the teacher’s input or level of control should decrease.

Some students may be reluctant to participate because of language issues. Some may feel insecure around their louder or more knowledgeable peers. Some students may have ideas to contribute but need support, encouragement, and feedback to participate.

Does your classroom physically support large-group discussions?

Desks or tables in rows may not be conducive to getting all students involved in peer-to-peer discussions: they can’t see each other’s faces, some students hide behind others so as not to participate, and teachers tend to focus on the students nearest to them. Try arranging the desks in a circle or open-U format. (You may have to practice with students to develop a routine for moving desks or tables efficiently.) Sitting in the circle with the students makes a powerful statement about the ownership of the conversation—the teacher is part of the discussion, not just an emcee or moderator.

Establish classroom norms for discussions. What kinds of behaviors or interactions are acceptable? Model the discussion behaviors you’d like your students to learn: attentive listening, wait time, courtesy, and how to channel enthusiasm or express disagreement positively. Resist the urge to “butt in” when the student says something incorrect or controversial. Ask other students to respond first. A question such as “What do you think?” “Do you have anything to add?” or “What did you conclude from this?” can encourage more students to participate.

Students may already have a page of “sentence starters” in their notebooks for written work. Perhaps a section on non-threatening conversation-starters or -continuers could be added: I’d like to know more about… Could you please repeat that? Why do you think that… Here’s what I think you said… What is your source? Can you give me another example? May I add to that? I agree/disagree with that because… Have you considered… I’m not quite sure what you mean.

Students can practice these behaviors in a Think-Pair-Share activity. Discussing ideas with a partner may help them to identify what they might want to say later in a large group. You could start by giving each student a brief reading on familiar or interesting content, such as a news article or website. In this way the students can focus on the process of discussion rather than the acquisition of information.

As students converse, whether in small groups or whole-class, observe what others are doing. Are they interested? Trying to get a word in? Left out?

Recognize that small-group discussions can be very spirited. Don’t worry about the noise level until and unless it gets to be a distraction or a disruption. Often teachers and students select an agreed-upon signal to tone down the noise level or stop the conversations to regroup as a class (e.g., flick the classroom lights, clap their hands, a small bell).

The November 2014 issue of Educational Leadership has articles related to talking and listening in the classroom. Several are available online without a subscription:

• Talking to Learn
• Now Presenting 
• Research Says: Get All Students to Speak Up

Explicitly Speaking, a recent article in Science and Children promotes scientific language and communications through awareness, modeling, supported practice, and integration.

This week, the Association of American Publishers PreK–12 Learning Group announced the year’s top learning resources, its 50^th year of providing this service to the education community. The 2016 REVERE Awards Finalists include resources from PreK to 12, from print to electronic, and from classroom to “beyond.” Among the impressive and diverse list of Finalists in this year’s competition are eight publications by the National Science Teachers Association. Finalists received the highest ratings from a corps of judges composed of professional educators and publishing-industry experts.

Supplemental Resources

NSTA Press’s book Argument-Driven Inquiry in Life Science: Lab Investigations for Grades 6–8, by Patrick Enderle and colleagues, is a Finalist for Supplemental Resources in Science this year. The goals of science education today include helping students not only understand important concepts but also learn to do science. The Next Generation Science Standards emphasize that students need to understand disciplinary core ideas, be aware of seven crosscutting concepts that span the disciplines of science, and learn how to participate in eight key scientific practices to be proficient in science. One increasingly popular way to knit all these elements together is argument-driven inquiry, an innovative approach to lab instruction and the focus of this book of laboratory investigations in life science for middle school. The emphasis in these engaging labs is on argumentation—the process of proposing, supporting, evaluating, and refining claims in the science classroom. This book is part of the growing Argument-Driven Inquiry Series.

Professional Resources

In the category of Instruction and Classroom Practice, AAP named Teaching for Conceptual Understanding in Science, by Richard Konicek-Moran and Page Keeley among the Finalists. The book is an engaging combination of deep thinking about teaching and learning for understanding; field-tested, classroom-ready strategies that support conceptual understanding in grades K–12; and personal vignettes with lessons for all educators. Konicek-Moran and Keeley guide teachers in how to really think about “the major goal of science education in the 21^st century”: to help students understand science at the conceptual level so they can see its connections to other fields, other concepts, and their lives. Konicek-Moran is author of seven additional books with NSTA Press in the Everyday Science Mysteries Series. Keeley has authored 11 books with NSTA Press in the Uncovering Student Ideas in Science Series.

Honored in the category of Specific Learning Populations this year is NGSS for All Students, edited by Okhee Lee, Emily Miller, and Rita Januszyk. Through rich case studies, Lee, Miller, and Januszyk vividly illustrate research- and standards-based classroom strategies to engage seven diverse demographic groups in science learning: economically disadvantaged students, students from major racial and ethnic groups, students with disabilities, English language learners, girls, students in alternative education, and gifted and talented students. The case studies span all grade levels and science disciplines.

Two more NSTA Press Finalists in the Subject Areas category are The Power of Questioning: Guiding Student Investigations, by Julie V. McGough and Lisa M. Nyberg, and Solar Science: Exploring Sunspots, Seasons, Eclipses, and More, by Dennis Schatz and Andrew Fraknoi.

In The Power of Questioning, McGough and Nyberg invite grades K–6 teachers to nurture the potential for learning that grows out of children’s irrepressible urge to ask questions. The book’s foundation is a three-part instructional model grounded in questioning, investigation, and assessment. To bring the strategies to life, the authors provide vivid pictures as well as links to special videos and audio recordings direct from an elementary classroom in all its questioning and tumultuous glory.

In Solar Science, Schatz and Fraknoi provide grades 5–8 teachers with 45 lessons related to the Sun, including such topics as the Sun’s motions, the measurement of time and seasons in our daily lives, and the causes of both solar and lunar eclipses. The classroom-tested activities support the three-dimensional learning encouraged by the Next Generation Science Standards and connect to the Common Core State Standards. The book comes packaged with an observer’s guide to viewing the upcoming 2017 total solar eclipse as well as eclipse-viewing glasses that can help teachers model safe Sun-observation practices.

Magazines

In the REVERE Awards Magazine Finalists, NSTA Journals are honored for three publications this year. In the category of Professional Magazines, Science and Children’s “Engineering Encounters” is named a Finalist among Departments and Columns. “Engineering Encounters” seeks to both celebrate creative ways to incorporate engineering design into the elementary curriculum and familiarize teachers with ways that engineering and science overlap.

The Science Teacher’s “Teaching the Manhattan Project,” by Elizabeth Schibuk, is named a Finalist in Feature Articles for presenting a nuclear chemistry unit on the research effort that led to the development of the world’s first nuclear weapons. The article, marking the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan, offers teachers a way to teach the science and history of the world’s first use of a nuclear weapon in war, while acknowledging the emotional and moral impact of the discussion.

In the category of Single Issue Editorial awards, Science and Children’s September 2015 issue titled “Engineering and Design” is honored as a Finalist. The Next Generation Science Standards is leading the call for more emphasis on engineering in our schools. This issue of Science and Children includes strategies, ideas, and techniques to help elementary teachers bring engineering and the design process into their classrooms.

Each year the REVERE Awards honor the best in education resources and draws attention to the rich array of high-quality teaching materials developed across the educational publishing community. Congratulations to the authors and to the NSTA Press Books and NSTA Journals editorial, design, and production teams for receiving these eight Finalist honors in the 2016 REVERE Awards. For the full list of this year’s Finalists, visit the REVERE Awards pages and stay tuned for AAP’s announcement in June 2016 of the Winners in each of these categories.