Elicits Students’ Initial Ideas

"Here the teacher uses the second of the four core teaching practices. She elicits students’ ideas. In this case its about the distillation of a soft drink into pure water (or so it appears). Her students can be heard drawing upon outside-of-school experiences, things they’ve seen in the media, everyday language, prior instructed ideas, and more. This teaching also activates prior knowledge, so that students collectively can hear what previous knowledge they have might be valuable to draw upon as this unit unfolds. In addition to all this, Anna begins students on the science practice of modeling. She uses are strategy called a whole class consensus model to make more of students’ thinking visible."