price-2014gem

This article describes a two-phase lesson structure that uses a simulation to promote student engagement and reasoning in lessons with disciplinary core ideas for secondary school students. In phase 1, an idea-eliciting discussion, students observe a focusing event and then develop explanations and initial models without information from the teacher. This phase happens before a simulation is projected. In phase 2, a guided-modeling discussion, the projected simulation encourages students to reason about the model and to determine how they could modify and improve their initial explanations. Questions based on the images in the simulation are used to exploit complexities of the simulation as opportunities for active student reasoning.