Select an Anchoring Phenomenon

Tool Purpose

1. Brainstorm interesting candidate anchoring phenomena or problems

2. Evaluate your top candidates based on a set of criteria. 

3. Select your anchoring phenomenon

What’s Included

This tool contains two resources. First is a set of resources to help you brainstorm candidate anchoring phenomena and evaluate them for fit with your course, standards, potential to engage with solutions and amount of design work. Second is a set of resources to help you learn which of the promising phenomena students find interesting and relevant through a student survey and/or classroom discussion. Both resources include examples from the Allergy pathway, Peach pathway, Salmon pathway, Wildfire pathway for inspiration. 

Importance for Unit Design

An anchoring phenomenon is a real-world event, process, or problem that is complex enough to sustain student inquiry throughout a unit and connects to the science concepts students need to learn. The role of the anchoring phenomenon in a storyline unit is to: 

• Motivate questions and investigations.

• Create a real-world context to figure out science ideas.

• Serve as the through line for students to dig deep into a complex problem.

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Selecting the right anchoring phenomenon is the lynchpin to the success of a storyline unit and requires careful attention to your content and students' interests. A good anchoring phenomenon: 

For student interested and engagement: 

• Connects to local community and your students’ experiences

• Is interesting and/or relevant to students or their community.

• Generates curiosity, puzzlement, and a need to explain

For the instructional model

• Is too complex to explain in a single lesson

• Does not yield a quick answer in an online search

• Is observable in the sense that there are data, observations, videos, labs students can use to investigate it

For standards and course alignment and fit with the base unit

• Is in part explained by climate science concepts in the base unit (global temperature rise, greenhouse gases, the greenhouse effect, and carbon cycling)

• Requires additional ideas to explain that address standards in your course content. 

When selecting your phenomenon, consider how it will provide a compelling entry point that leads naturally into the base unit while remaining grounded in your local context.

Teacher Perspectives

Two teachers, Enya (Peach Pathway) and Rebecca (Allergy Pathway), talk through their decisions for selecting local anchoring phenomena they thought would be meaningful to their students and the culminating tasks they designed.

Teacher Perspectives 

One teacher, Brian (Salmon Pathway), shares his rationale for selecting a local anchoring phenomenon or orca and salmon population declines in Oregon, what happens in his unit, and his desire for students to feel they are part of the solution.