At Shipley, intellectual risk-taking and self-discovery—not blackboard notes or PowerPoint presentations—are front and center in Upper School science teacher Elizabeth Zodda’s classroom.

In order to encourage her physics students to engage in scientific discourse and build curiosity, Zodda uses a dynamic framework called Ambitious Science Teaching. Based on a book of the same name published by Harvard Education Press, this framework is supported by four sets of core practices that work together throughout every unit of study: planning for engagement with big science ideas, eliciting students’ ideas, supporting ongoing changes in thinking, and drawing together evidence-based explanations.

“The students themselves set the stage for each unit, which begins with an anchoring event—some sort of physics phenomenon that they can’t yet explain. They present their thinking to each other when they don’t know if they’ve got the right answer, and they get feedback from each other rather than from me,” explains Zodda, recipient of the Margaret Bailey Speer Distinguished Teacher Award, who holds a master’s degree in teaching, learning, and curriculum from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. “With Ambitious Science Teaching, students work as scientists, who only have each other to help them figure out whether they’re on the right track or not. This gives them a really good sense of how scientists actually work, talking to each other and solving problems together.”

Zodda relies heavily on lab reports—not quizzes or tests—to evaluate student learning at the end of each unit. In these reports, students are responsible for posing a question based on careful observation, designing a controlled investigation, crafting a directional hypothesis, constructing a graph, identifying a relationship between independent and dependent variables, utilizing mathematics to transform data into evidence, and making a claim supported by evidence and reasoning gathered from their analysis.

“The students understand that this isn’t just an answer-getting exercise. They know that the process of hypothesizing and making a claim is really the skill that I’m measuring here,” Zodda says. “In this way, especially with so many opportunities for meaningful feedback early on, they tell me that they feel they have a lot of control over their grades.”