The anchors literally hold the content together, in a way.
I want to be sure that my activities are tied into the anchor and providing the information they need to solve that problem or answer that question. They were able to connect with what we were learning about, and they were able to see how one concept connected to the next by seeing how it all related to our anchor.Īnd in terms of planning, I actually always identify the anchoring phenomenon before I develop any activities in a unit. Whenever we started a unit, students were immediately engaged in the content and prior knowledge began to surface. Since then, I have spent some time learning about anchoring phenomenon, and I really feel my students benefited from what I was able to implement. I mean, I understood that doing a demo in a physical science classroom could be an anchor that students could explore throughout the unit - but what about my life science class? What about my earth science class?
When I first learned about anchors, I will be honest – I didn’t know what the heck they were talking about. One way of focusing students on the “big picture” in a unit is to present an anchoring phenomenon that students work toward understanding and explaining. One of the big shifts with the Next Generation Science Standards is that you are no longer teaching content for content’s sake - science instruction is no longer based around a list of facts, but rather, the focus is on the broader concepts that connect those facts together and the skill development necessary to investigate and understand those concepts. Building Units Around Anchoring Phenomena
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