Teaching for Uncertainty

Shifting our teaching toward uncertainty includes:

  • Expanding our view of what counts as science and learning to see the science in children’s thinking

  • Learning to see uncertainty from children’s perspectives

  • Developing teaching practices that attune to uncertainty, make uncertainty public, support discussion, and help children make progress.

  • Being flexible and taking a long-term view: There is no one right way for you and the youth you work with to engage with uncertainty. This will differ as you develop strategies and with each class you work with.

As teachers, we’re used to having or trying to have control. The feeling of giving up control can be scary and overwhelming. I remember not knowing where to start or how to even allow for uncertainty in my classroom.

 Then in one of the investigations, students were testing if water expands in weight when frozen. The students all measured the weight of a vial filled with water and we let them freeze. While the water was freezing, the scale was knocked off the table and the calibration was off. When students started weighing the vials after they were frozen, the measurements were all over the place (some way up, some way down) and I began to panic. I almost explained to them it was broken but then I realized they were already having conversations about what might be going wrong, based on the patterns we were seeing. Instead of jumping in, I let them talk about this and share ideas. The next day, I used this uncertainty to drive a lesson on testing the scale and learning about mistakes in experiments. It was that "ah-ha" moment for me, where I truly understood the power that uncertainty can have in my classroom. 

 As you do it more and more, it becomes more comfortable. There’s always some sense of nervousness if something doesn’t go the way you want. But I’ve learned that there’s always tomorrow. We’re always learning something and if something is unfinished I can use the sense of uncertainty to drive what will happen the next day. And there’s always a balancing act—sometimes the students can get to where they need and sometimes I still will have to tell them. Also, I have come to be able to focus on the process they’re going through, not just the end result.

Lorin, 5th grade teacher

The Moment of Uncertainty Practice

Throughout our examples and cases, we hope you’ll see the structure below at work. Teachers surface uncertainty, then support discussion in which students engage with each other’s ideas, and then do something with students’ ideas— drawing these ideas and further questions together. We have found this structure useful for slowing ourselves down and for analyzing classroom conversations to think about supportive teaching practices.

“When a student says something you don’t understand, don’t assume she is wrong or confused. Assume that she is making sense and that you don’t yet understand her.”

— Rosebery and Hudicourt-Barnes, 2006