How Do I Help My Students Learn to Plan and Carry Out Investigations?

A pre-service teacher I was observing asked me this question after one of her lessons did not go the way she had hoped, and it is one I get a lot. 

Whenever she sets out the materials and tells students to start working, the same thing happens. A few minutes in, hands go up. A line forms by her desk. Students who do start working are uncertain about what they should be measuring or how to use the equipment in front of them.

The pattern is familiar, and it is not a student-motivation issue or a classroom-management issue.

It is a design and facilitation issue, which means it is something we can actually solve.

Seven Keys for Designing the Investigation

1. Help students see why they would plan an investigation in the first place.

An investigation is a way to fill in a missing piece of an explanation. When students see planning as a way to close a gap in their own understanding, the practice stops feeling like a school task and starts feeling like a tool.

2. Create a genuine need to investigate.

Curiosity grows out of uncertainty. A phenomenon that contradicts what students already know, or that admits more than one plausible explanation, gives students a real reason to look closely rather than wait to be told the answer.

3. Make sure students have ideas to pull from before they plan.

Scientists do not plan in a vacuum, and neither should students. Before the planning step, give students access to the disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts, and other science practices they can draw on. Planning then becomes a moment of applying ideas rather than guessing without them.

4. Put students into groups of four and have them sit together.

Planning is a social practice. Groups of four, sitting together from the start, allow students to think out loud, build on one another's ideas, and develop a shared plan they all understand. Individual think time still has a place, but it is not the place to draft an investigation plan from scratch.

5. Use a graphic organizer, but match it to the kind of investigation.

Asking for a hypothesis on every investigation tends to teach students that a hypothesis is a prediction of what will happen, when it is actually a possible explanation for why or how something happens. Match the organizer to whether the investigation is descriptive, pattern-finding, hypothesis-testing, or model-based, and always include a place for students to record what they will do to stay safe.

6. Hold a tool talk before students begin to plan.

Gather students around a single table where the materials are laid out. Pick up each item, name it, ask what it might be used for, and offer practical advice. Resist putting materials on the group tables before this conversation happens — when materials are already in front of students, tinkering tends to fill the space planning is supposed to occupy.

7. Teach techniques separately from the investigation that uses them.

Students are unlikely to figure out how to use a microscope, a probeware sensor, or a new measurement technique in the middle of an investigation. Give techniques their own time, in a short skill-builder lesson, so that during the investigation students can decide when and how to use the technique.

Five Keys for Facilitating the Investigation

8. Give feedback on plans before students begin.

Plans do not need to be perfect to be productive. They need to be safe, focused on the right question, and reasonable enough to generate useful data. Read each group's plan before they start collecting data, ask the question or two that will sharpen it, and expect at least one round of revision.

9. Use a "two questions, a nudge, and a goal" routine when you check in.

The two questions give a quick read on where the group is. The nudge offers a hint or a problematizing question that pushes the group toward a productive next step. The goal sets a specific target the group will reach before you return.

10. Have groups share what they figured out and how they know it.

Give students a chance to put their thinking on the table and have other groups poke holes in it. Over time, the questions other groups ask migrate inward — students start asking them of themselves while they are still planning.

11. Hold a reflective discussion focused on improvement, not grading.

After the share, give the class time to surface norms and rules of thumb they can carry into the next investigation: ways to reduce error, ways to rule out alternative explanations, ways to make data easier to interpret. The norms students propose tend to stick, because they are theirs.

12. Have students write a "note to my future self."

Three to five minutes of writing at the end of the lesson, addressed to the version of themselves who will plan the next investigation, makes metacognition concrete. Over a year, those notes become a personal record of best practices in the student's own voice.

Putting It All Together

None of these keys is exotic, and most teachers will recognize pieces of the set from their own practice. What I have come to believe is that the pieces work best in combination, and that the persistent difficulty of helping students learn to plan and carry out investigations is not evidence that students cannot do this work or that we are not skilled enough to teach it.

It is evidence that the default structure of a classroom investigation is not designed to share the cognitive work of planning between teacher and student, and that it has to be redesigned.

How ADI Makes This Easier

The first seven keys (the design keys) are the most demanding part of this work, because designing investigations that surface a real puzzle, give students access to the right disciplinary ideas, match the right organizer to the right kind of investigation, and build in a tool talk and skill builder is not something most of us have time to do from scratch every week.

That is exactly the work Argument-Driven Inquiry (ADI) materials do for you.

ADI investigations are built around phenomena that admit multiple plausible explanations, structured to give students the disciplinary ideas they need before they plan, and paired with graphic organizers matched to the kind of investigation. The seven-stage ADI instructional model builds in the planning conversation, the share-out, the reflective discussion, and the writing-to-future-self routines as part of the lesson architecture itself.

When you teach with ADI, the design work behind the first seven keys is already done, and the structure of the lesson supports the remaining five.

Want to See the Keys in Action?

Browse sample investigations and learn more about ADI curriculum materials, the ADI Learning Hub, and our professional learning options at argumentdriveninquiry.com.