Talks by Michael Novak
CSSS/NSELA Joint Webinar, 2018
An introduction to the anchoring phenomenon routine, one of the five instructional routines used ... more An introduction to the anchoring phenomenon routine, one of the five instructional routines used to support students in meaningful engagement in three0dimensional learning through NGSS storylines. This talk uses examples for a HS evolution unit and MS sound unit to illustrate what the elements of this routine look like at different grade levels and in different topic areas.
Paper Set Presented at NARST 2019, 2019
Presented at NSTA Area Conference, Milwaukee, WI, 2017
2016 Minneapolis Area Conference
■ Practices are more than just skills. ¤ Practices should be meaningful to students -not rote ¤ S... more ■ Practices are more than just skills. ¤ Practices should be meaningful to students -not rote ¤ Students should be pursuing a larger sensemaking or design questions that motivates the particular activity ■ Students should know why they are doing what they are doing each activity. It needs to connect back to our question.
Papers by Michael Novak
A tension in designing classroom learning involves balancing the questions and interests of stude... more A tension in designing classroom learning involves balancing the questions and interests of students with the goals of teachers and standards. One approach to navigating this tension in science classrooms is to simultaneously support and constrain students’ questions about an observable natural phenomenon in the classroom and then take up those questions throughout a unit of instruction. Analyses of students’ questions at the start of a middle school science unit and their responses to surveys throughout the unit suggest that students perceive that their questions are indeed driving learning, suggesting the promise of supporting students’ epistemic agency through co-construction of questions, ideas, and investigations in storylines.
Journal of Science Teacher Education, 2021
The vision of the Framework and NGSS requires important shifts in teaching approaches and instruc... more The vision of the Framework and NGSS requires important shifts in teaching approaches and instructional materials. We argue that this commitment to engaging learners in meaningful practice and supporting students' epistemic agency entails that we support coherence from the students' perspective. This coherence arises when students see their science work as making progress on questions and problems their classroom community has committed to address, rather than simply following directions from textbooks or teachers. We present an instructional model, storylines, to support this form of coherence. The storylines approach includes design principles for engaging students with phenomena and problems to elicit their own questions that teachers, with support of curriculum materials, use to guide the trajectory of their sensemaking. We describe how storylines organize cycles of engaging with phenomena, questions, and sensemaking to incrementally build, test, and revise explanatory models and design solutions. Storylines are supported by a collection of instructional routines and norms that provide strategies and tools to guide teachers' work with students around phenomena, questions, and sensemaking. The routines reflect strategies for eliciting questions from anchoring phenomena, navigation to engage students as partners in managing the direction of investigations, problematizing to help students find gaps in their work so far, and putting pieces together to support students in assembling what they have figured out. We present examples from elementary, middle, and high school storyline-based units awarded the NGSS design badge to illustrate the application of these design principles in the design and enactment of storyline-based units.
This is a 2 ½ week unit designed to cover high-school and introductory college level topics in th... more This is a 2 ½ week unit designed to cover high-school and introductory college level topics in the properties of gases and gas particle behavior. The unit includes thirteen activities. Seven of the activities use computer models to explore these topics in greater depth and using a greater degree of student inquiry and guided discovery than would be typically possible through other learning activities in the same amount of time.
Journal of Science Education and Technology, 2014
In this article, we introduce a class of constructionist learning environments that we call Emerg... more In this article, we introduce a class of constructionist learning environments that we call Emergent Systems Sandboxes (ESSs), which have served as a centerpiece of our recent work in developing curriculum to support scalable model-based learning in classroom settings. ESSs are a carefully specified form of virtual construction environment that support students in creating, exploring, and sharing computational models of dynamic systems that exhibit emergent phenomena. They provide learners with ''entity''-level construction primitives that reflect an underlying scientific model. These primitives can be directly ''painted'' into a sandbox space, where they can then be combined, arranged, and manipulated to construct complex systems and explore the emergent properties of those systems. We argue that ESSs offer a means of addressing some of the key barriers to adopting rich, constructionist model-based inquiry approaches in science classrooms at scale. Situating the ESS in a large-scale science modeling curriculum we are implementing across the USA, we describe how the unique ''entity-level'' primitive design of an ESS facilitates knowledge system refinement at both an individual and social level, we describe how it supports flexible modeling practices by providing both continuous and discrete modes of executability, and we illustrate how it offers students a variety of opportunities for validating their qualitative understandings of emergent systems as they develop.
Journal of Science Education and Technology, Apr 1, 2015
In this article, we introduce a class of constructionist learning environments that we call Emerg... more In this article, we introduce a class of constructionist learning environments that we call Emergent Systems Sandboxes (ESSs), which have served as a centerpiece of our recent work in developing curriculum to support scalable model-based learning in classroom settings. ESSs are a carefully specified form of virtual construction environment that support students in creating, exploring, and sharing computational models of dynamic systems that exhibit emergent phenomena. They provide learners with ''entity''-level construction primitives that reflect an underlying scientific model. These primitives can be directly ''painted'' into a sandbox space, where they can then be combined, arranged, and manipulated to construct complex systems and explore the emergent properties of those systems. We argue that ESSs offer a means of addressing some of the key barriers to adopting rich, constructionist model-based inquiry approaches in science classrooms at scale. Situating the ESS in a large-scale science modeling curriculum we are implementing across the USA, we describe how the unique ''entity-level'' primitive design of an ESS facilitates knowledge system refinement at both an individual and social level, we describe how it supports flexible modeling practices by providing both continuous and discrete modes of executability, and we illustrate how it offers students a variety of opportunities for validating their qualitative understandings of emergent systems as they develop.
This is a 2 ½ week unit designed to cover high-school and introductory college level topics in th... more This is a 2 ½ week unit designed to cover high-school and introductory college level topics in the properties of gases and gas particle behavior. The unit includes thirteen activities. Seven of the activities use computer models to explore these topics in greater depth and using a greater degree of student inquiry and guided discovery than would be typically possible through other learning activities in the same amount of time.
Conference Presentations by Michael Novak
National Science Teacher Association, 2018
This NSTA Virtual Conference shows how phenomena are used to drive student learning in first-grad... more This NSTA Virtual Conference shows how phenomena are used to drive student learning in first-grade physical science unit of instruction, designed for NGSS.
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Talks by Michael Novak
Papers by Michael Novak
Conference Presentations by Michael Novak