Making Light Work of Gravity: Scaffolding Middle Schoolers’ Thinking to Help Them Understand Gravitational Lensing

Although the NGSS has helped teachers conceptualize teaching science in a more integrated way, effectively scaffolding students' thinking within and across lessons can still be a challenge for any middle school science teacher. To help with this problem, we use a spiral ­curriculum where relevant prior concepts are revisited to connect them to new concepts. Revisiting concepts is meant to deepen students' knowledge by scaffolding students' thinking rather than merely repeating previous content. In our classroom, our light unit comes before our unit on space science. In this article, we demonstrate how we scaffold students' learning to help students make connections between lessons about light (MS-PS4-2) and gravity (partially ­addressing MS-ESS1-2). We use these experiences to help students understand the phenomenon of gravitational lensing.