Intentional Use of Classroom Routines

Classroom routines are structures that students engage in repeatedly over the course of a year and across multiple years. OpenSciEd instructional materials include structured routines with explicit goals to serve as scaffolds for students to learn sophisticated scientific and engineering practices and to establish and maintain an engaging, productive, and equitable classroom culture through norms and expectations about behavior and social interaction. Routines help draw out student questions and identification of problems and use them to guide the ongoing science work of the class, support students in tracking progress toward the unit’s learning goal as well as the current explanations, models, or designs, and help students develop gapless explanations and discuss how to move from one lesson to the next. Teachers are guided in developing and maintaining classroom norms to support student engagement in the science and engineering practices through productive talk.