I’m stuck on chapter 9 of Settlage and Southerland’s Teaching Science to Every Child.  In this chapter, the authors describe the five phases of a learning cycle model: Engage, Explore, Explain, Extend and Evaluate.  From my observations of classrooms, as well as my beginning observations of STARs, I wanted to discuss the first E: Engage.  Settlage and Southerland describe “engagement” as when the “teacher taps into student backgrounds as a way to lead into the topic they are to be investigating” (p. 220).

How do we engage our students into the conversations?  In looking at reform-based teachers, engagement includes framing […]