As students dive deeper into science education, educators are finding new ways to not only enable students to learn science better and more efficiently but also more proficient ways to teach it. This is where sensemaking comes into play — here, students aren’t just being handed the information to learn and memorize, but they are actively using stance, cognitive processes, and discourse with peers to try to fully understand how the world works. It’s important as teachers to promote active sensemaking in our classroom where students can share their ideas and incorporate their past knowledge with the new materials to obtain higher learning.
As I view the lesson, “Using models to develop a scientific explanation: A sound unit overview” on Tools for Ambitious Science Teaching, I am observing ways sensemaking is being used in connection with the sensemaking theory of Odden and Russ. Students in this video are led through the process of sensemaking while trying to understand why and how the sound of a singer’s voice can shatter glass. The students are shown a video of the phenomenon and then they discuss with their peers what they think is happening. After they view the video they are asked to pair up and talk about what they think is happening, even as they view the video some students are asking questions out loud about what’s happening in the video, as they draw their models they have conversations with others to “further develop their models and explanations”, and they work in groups to make a consensus model that would tie everything they learned together. In the group presentation, we were able to see that the three students made their activity to try out and test their explanation of how sound and vibrations work and travel, “What we figured out is that I put my ear to a table and then I just gently, we just gently knocked on it. And then we and then I pulled my ear back and I knocked the same force and it was actually quieter so we figured out that sound travels through things…” (3:45) Students were also able to give written feedback after hearing what each group had to say about their consensus model, and this is also a great way students could analyze and provide critique or constructivism (2:55). This is when they start sense making — making models of what they see are happening and continuously revising their models until they develop a full explanation.
First, let’s talk about sensemaking as a stance toward science learning. This is when students build an epistemological frame in which they use to come about and conquer learning-based activities — it’s the ultimate goal and expectations students have in mind when sensemaking and learning about something new. Students don’t yet know or understand what’s happening in these activities, and so they use their “own ideas, intuitions, and experiences” to try to tackle and figure out the problem (Odden & Russ 7). Science isn’t just about memorizing facts, it’s about understanding why and how things work to get a better understanding of the amazing phenomenons that happen in our world daily. An important note to keep in mind is that these frames are not only different from people to people, but it also changes within a person when they discover new things to focus on as they go through the activity. Sensemaking is special as students are truly trying to understand what’s happening and not only trying to find the answer.
Next, we’ll talk about sensemaking as a cognitive process. This focuses on how each person makes sense of the question at hand based on the prior knowledge and experiences that they already have, and how this new knowledge and past knowledge integrates to develop a new way of thinking. When sensemaking occurs in science, it often clashes with our past knowledge as there are so many “unfamiliar, abstract, or complex concepts” that might completely be different from what we already know. (Odden & Russ 8) As well as knowledge integration, self-explanations also help students make sense of the new information by creating explanations that will make it easier to understand for themselves. As students obtain knowledge from different areas of the world, they often have gaps and missing pieces within certain ideas, and the process of sensemaking helps them connect these missing gaps in their knowledge.
Learning and sensemaking don’t just take place in one day — it is a long process in which students take to develop their thoughts, connecting their past knowledge with the new information given to them, and putting all these pieces together to come to a full understanding on how a certain phenomenon works.
Two key elements of discourse in sensemaking are construction and critique where students are “constructing claims and explanations” collaboratively by “building an explanation by repeatedly connecting pieces of evidence to back up a claim, and/ or constructing a warrant that links this evidence to the claim”(Odden & Russ 10). During the discourse, students must be using language and terminology that they understand, and discourse isn’t something that can just be done in one’s head, it must involve actual student discussion. This discourse is so important in sensemaking because it gives the chance for students to construct and share their thoughts with others, students can give critique on each other’s ideas, and students are collaborating to come to a scientific explanation. All of these three stances of sensemaking work together and overlap in so many different ways throughout the entire learning process so that students can “ build[ing] an explanation in order to resolve a gap or inconsistency in knowledge” (Odden & Russ 13).
As teachers, they need to develop lesson plans that involve higher orders of thinking and organize many pair, group, and class discussions to work toward creating a science learning environment based on this theoretical view of sensemaking. Especially in science instruction, students should participate in hands-on activities that can help build their explanations by letting students figure out what are the missing gaps in their knowledge by testing the theories presented in the question themselves (Odden & Russ 5). They also need to keep in mind that every student learns differently and they bring in different knowledge and cultures to the classroom that must be acknowledged as the way students approach a problem and learn new material is connected with their past knowledge. It is also a good idea for teachers to prepare a lesson regarding Guidelines for Productive Discussion and ways to create good models that illustrate ideas including their thoughts and evidence-based readings, videos, etc. These models will not only help students make a better sense of their ideas, but it will also help teachers evaluate their learning and adjust their future instructional lessons according to the students’ needs.
Works Cited
Odden, Tor Ole B., and Rosemary S. Russ. “Defining Sensemaking: Bringing Clarity to a Fragmented Theoretical Construct.” Wiley Online Library, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 6 June 2018, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sce.21452.
Elementary Series. (n.d.). Retrieved August 02, 2020, from https://ambitiousscienceteaching.org/elementary-series/
Anastasia Wang is an upcoming junior at Mission San Jose High School. Throughout her years in school, she believes understanding the material is a major key to success. Sensemaking should be required by all teachers to better engage the material with students.
