Educational Insights

A district science curriculum coordinator sent me this question, and I suspect a lot of people reading this will recognize themselves in it: “Every year I have teachers leaving or moving to other schools. It feels like I am constantly introducing new teachers to ADI instead of helping anyone work on specific problems of practice. What can I do?” This is one of the most common frustrations I hear from instructional leaders, and it is a real one. If a third of your science teac

A fifth-grade teacher who has used ADI for several years sent me this question: “The older books had one lab handout for the whole investigation. Now there’s a separate handout for each stage. Why the change? Isn’t it more to copy and keep track of?” It is a little more to keep track of, and I want to acknowledge that up front. But the change was not about packaging. It was about protecting the parts of an investigation that matter most and are easiest to lose. In the earlie

A Texas science coordinator asked me this question while her district was reviewing materials: “We’ve used the NGSS versions of ADI in the past. Are the Texas books just those same books with TEKS codes added? Or are they actually different?” It is a fair question to ask, because a lot of “state editions” in education publishing are exactly that: the same lessons with a new standards table in the back. The Texas ADI books are not that. They share the same instructional model

A kindergarten teacher asked me this question after seeing a colleague teach an ADI investigation in fourth grade: “I love what I saw, but my students can’t read the texts or write a report yet. How is ADI in K–2 different from what happens in third grade and up? Can five-year-olds really argue from evidence?” The second question is the one underneath the first, so I want to start there. Yes, they can. Young children are remarkably good at noticing patterns, asking why, and t

A middle school teacher asked me this question at a recent conference, and I realized I had never answered it all in one place: “I keep hearing about Phenomenon-Driven Tasks. What exactly are they, and why would I use them instead of the assessments I already have?” The short answer is that a Phenomenon-Driven Task (PDT) is an assessment designed to show you how students think, not just what answers they produce. The longer answer starts with a problem most science teachers a

Two teachers can hand out the same argument template on the same day and produce two different lessons. In one classroom, the template puts the grounds behind a claim in front of the class so the claim can be examined and revised. In the other, it becomes a worksheet to fill in and turn in for points. The tool did not change. The teaching did. We have spent two decades building materials that give students something to argue about. Curricula, instructional models, graphic org

A curriculum director asked me this on a call last spring, and she was not asking out of curiosity. She had a procurement form in front of her with two boxes on it, and the box she checked determined which budget the purchase came out of and which review process it went through. I will give her the direct answer, because I think a straight one is more useful than a careful one. Today, our books are investigation books. We built them that way on purpose. Each one is a set of c

A middle school science teacher asked me this after a workshop, and she said it the way most teachers do, with a small apology attached, as if she were confessing to a gap she should have closed years ago. The gap is real. It is just almost never the gap the teacher thinks it is. Teachers who ask this usually assume what they are missing is engineering content: statics, materials science, circuits, CAD. What is actually missing is a way to structure a design task so that stud

A teacher asked me a version of this question after a workshop, and it is one I hear all the time. She loves hands-on science and knows her students learn more when they are doing rather than watching. But every time she sets out the materials and turns students loose, the room gets away from her. Groups race ahead before they know what they are doing, a few students take over while others drift, materials get misused, and by the time she has put out one fire another has star

This week’s question comes from a high school science teacher who writes: “You showed a matrix during your presentation with processes across the top (generate, critique, support, refine, problematize) and products down the side (model, explanation, argument, and so on). Can you explain what each of those processes and products actually means, and give some examples of what the tasks look like when you pair them up to assign group discussion tasks?” Thank you for sending this

A teacher asked me this question after a recent workshop, and it is one I get a lot. Whenever she tries to start a discussion, the same two or three students answer everything, the rest of the class checks out, and even when students do talk, they end up off topic in about thirty seconds. The pattern is familiar, and it is not a personality issue or a classroom-management issue. It is a design and facilitation issue, which means it is something we can actually solve. Below ar

Assessment has always been more than a neutral measure of student achievement. In science classrooms, assessments shape what gets taught, how it gets taught, and how students see themselves as learners. They signal what counts as important knowledge. They influence how classroom time is spent. And they affect which students come to believe they are “good at” science. At their best, assessments illuminate student thinking, guide instruction, and provide meaningful feedback. At

When Round Rock ISD first encountered Argument-Driven Inquiry (ADI), they saw a vision for what inquiry-based science instruction could look like: authentic, student-centered, and aligned with rigorous standards. By training a Science Cadre, piloting investigations, and scaling through PLCs, the district built teacher leadership and transformed classrooms. Today, ADI helps RRISD teachers engage every student in doing real science while also strengthening literacy and critical

Critical thinking in inquiry encourages students to question, analyze, and evaluate information. It pushes them beyond passive learning to active discovery.