Literacy and Discourse Practices in STEM

Catalog description

Educators excel at creating and managing classroom environments that allow students opportunities to make sense of new ideas and deepen their understanding of the world around them. Through facilitating student interactions and carefully implementing meaningful activities to provide all learners’ opportunities to engage in the learning process, teachers encourage “sense-making” of new ideas, a skill set that is understood as central to the craft of teaching. Sense-making is a social and collaborative process of active engagement with new information, and requires that learners have opportunities to discuss, debate, reason, and reflect so that they can deconstruct and reconstruct their understanding. Participants in the course will learn specific skills and practices for facilitating student interactions that lead students to make sense of new ideas.