How can we design science learning that allows multilingual learners to shine? This session explores instructional approaches and teacher moves that create rich opportunities for students to use their full range of meaning-making resources. Through classroom examples—such as building consensus ideas or sharing noticings and wonderings about puzzling phenomena—we'll examine moments when students make their thinking public, collaborate, and grow as sensemakers. Drawing on BSCS Science Learning's research and curriculum development, this session offers concrete, classroom-tested strategies you can bring back immediately.

TAKEAWAYS:
Multilingual learners are brilliant and capable of engaging in rich and rigorous scientific sensemaking when classrooms make space for their ideas. Walk away with practical tools and routines that elevate student thinking and strengthen whole-class science sensemaking.

SPEAKERS:
Susan Gomez Zwiep

How do teacher leaders, coaches, and site leaders develop the vision, language, and tools to support teachers making the shifts called for by NGSS? In this session, participants will experience 3-dimensional, phenomenon-driven science instruction through a learner lens using the same high-quality materials their teachers use. Then participants will examine that experience through a coaching lens. We'll surface the real barriers to implementation that coaches encounter, build a shared set of observation look-fors grounded in firsthand experience, and develop coaching conversation starters tied directly to 3D learning in the classroom. Through this dual lens of learner and coach, participants will leave with a clearer picture of what effective NGSS implementation looks like, sounds like, and feels like and what it takes to support teachers in getting there.

TAKEAWAYS:
Leaders who have been inside the learning coach with more precision. Walk away with observation look-fors and coaching moves built from firsthand experience with OpenSciEd Elementary materials and prepared for your next classroom visit and coaching conversations.

SPEAKERS:
Guy Ollison

Discover how mathematics becomes a powerful tool for science sensemaking in elementary classrooms through the lens of OpenSciEd Elementary units. In this session, participants will experience how elementary-age learners engage with mathematics and computational thinking and data—measurements, observations, sketches, photos, and recordings—to make sense of real-world phenomena featured in OpenSciEd investigations. We’ll explore how children notice and describe variability, create visual displays to organize their ideas, and analyze and interpret patterns to answer questions and spark new inquiries. Through an immersive experience grounded in OpenSciEd materials, participants will experience how integrating mathematics, computational thinking, and data science practices into elementary science instruction deepens reasoning, supports a range of learners, and empowers children to think critically about the data they encounter every day.

TAKEAWAYS:
OpenSciEd K-5 units create rich opportunities to use math as a tool for sensemaking by exploring variability, creating data displays, and analyzing and interpreting patterns—strengthening students' mathematics, computational thinking, and data literacy while supporting grade-level standards.

SPEAKERS:
Amy Belcastro

How do literacy and science practices strengthen one another, and what can that look like in elementary classrooms? In this session, participants will learn about key research-based principles for integrating literacy and science in elementary classrooms. We will also engage with K-5 materials from the OpenSciEd Elementary curriculum as a model for how to enact these principles in classrooms. This will include a review of student-facing materials, including a variety of grade-level science texts, to showcase how integrating literacy practices into science lessons enhances both science and literacy learning. We will also examine teacher-facing materials and other curricular resources to understand how these tools help make the connections between science and ELA explicit. Finally, the presentation will highlight how teachers can apply these key principles in their classrooms to support young children’s sensemaking and ELA development.

TAKEAWAYS:
Integrating literacy practices within elementary science strengthens learning in both science and ELA. Participants will learn key research-based principles for integrating literacy into science time to support students’ sensemaking in science, while also building their ELA skills.

SPEAKERS:
Amy Belcastro