• Complex communications: Students organize their beginning understandings of an
idea in terms of verbal descriptions, analogies, diagrams, tentative models, other
representations. Skills in processing and interpreting both verbal and non-verbal
information from others in order to respond appropriately.
• Systems Thinking: Students initially attempt to understand how a system works,
how an action or change in one part of the system (i.e. model) affects the rest of the
system.
Complex communications: Students “try out” scientific discourses of posing
hypotheses; they connect questions and hypotheses with initial models or problem.
Students asked to craft a model-grounded scientific question.
• Systems Thinking: Includes abstract reasoning about how different elements of a
natural system interact.
Self-management: Students decide which resources or experiences are relevant to
answering big questions. They design (with guidance) scientific tests that will
generate evidence.
• Systems Thinking: Students hypothesize how a system works, how an action, or
change in one part of the system affects the rest of the system; adopt a “big picture”
perspective on work.
• Non-routine problem solving: Students examine broad span of information,
recognize patterns, narrow information to reach diagnosis of the problem.
• Complex communications: Students select key pieces of a complex idea to express
in words, sounds, and images, in order to build shared understanding.
• Non-routine problem solving: Students move beyond diagnosis to a solution
requires knowledge of how the information is linked conceptually. Students use
creativity to generate new and innovative solutions, integrating seemingly unrelated
information; and entertaining possibilities others may miss.
• Systems Thinking: Students adopt a “big picture” perspective, reasons abstractly
about how the different elements of a model interact.
• Complex communications: Students use skills in processing and interpreting both
verbal and non-verbal information from others in order to respond appropriately.
Negotiate ideas with others through social perceptiveness, persuasion, and instructing.

primary focus of student work is to solve complex problems,
and that multiple forms of learning activity by students (gathering relevant information,
collecting data, testing models, learning new concepts needed to understand the problem, etc.) is
always in the service of producing an evidence-based solution to a problem. The studio science
approach is characterized by a focus on a few key science ideas, purpose-driven group work,
student ownership of problems and problem-solving approaches, the on-going public vetting of
multiple solutions and models as they are being developed, and the use of feedback to refine
ideas and solutions.
reform science teaching is predicated on the regular pursuit of big questions or complex
problems, students’ ability (and habits of mind) to reflect on what they know and what they need
to know is crucial.
These solutions or explanations
require systems thinking and non-routine problem-solving as well as communication skills. The
communication skills here again involve the specialized disciplinary rhetoric of science. Social
perceptiveness, negotiating ideas with others, and even students teaching one another all play a
role in the culminating phase of reform teaching (complex communication).

teacher knowledge/skills
1. Deep interconnected content knowledge, ability to “see” big ideas in curriculum and
understand how to teach these as big ideas.
2. Ability to engage students in specialized classroom discourses aligned with reform
goals
3. Understanding the full range of assessment strategies, purposes and contexts within
which they should be used. Students’ conceptual learning and sophisticated disciplinary
performance are achieved in part by eliciting information from them through assessments as a
means of gauging where they are in their progress toward a goal (Duschl & Gitomer, 1997), by providing ongoing targeted feedback to them (Butler, 1987; Crooks, 1988).
4. Understanding how to learn from one’s practice.