Not Just for Science: Using the 5E Instructional Model to Engage and Respond to Students’ Thinking in Mathematics and Literacy

Starting with the Learning Outcome

Although there is not one right sequence of steps to design a lesson with the 5E model, identifying the intended learning outcome, often a grade level standard, should be the starting place. This learning outcome provides direction for the overall lesson as teachers use it to guide their thinking to plan each phase. Teachers can also use it as the basis for developing an open-ended, slightly ambiguous, or appropriately complex task for students to investigate during the lesson. This task may provide a useful opportunity for teachers to observe the different levels of thinking students bring to their work.

Centering Student Thinking

Throughout the phases of a 5E inquiry lesson, there should be multiple opportunities for students to apply, share, and discuss their thinking. Teachers must purposely develop tasks and questions that have multiple reasonable responses and that require students to engage in higher levels of thinking—thus, the questions should require more than recall, and the tasks should not be possible for students to complete through rote application of a practiced skill. At different stages of the lesson, students have opportunities to generate new ideas in response to a question, prompt or task; make decisions about how to approach a problem or situation; and apply new information, background knowledge, or personal experiences to their learning.

Essential to student-centered discourse in an inquiry context is that teachers plan how to help students think about concepts before telling them what to think. This requires developing purposeful, open-ended questions that will engage higher-level thinking skills and allow for a range of student responses related to the lesson’s concepts. To plan the facilitation of this student-centered discourse, teachers should intentionally organize the classroom space so students can see and hear one another during discussions and develop classroom routines for prompting students to expand on their thinking and evaluate the reasoning of others, such as the “Say More” and “Agree/Disagree and why” talk moves (Chapin et al., 2013).

Identifying Opportunities to Observe Student Understanding

Typically, students are asked to demonstrate their understanding of the topic at the end of a lesson. While this allows them to express what they have learned about the concepts, it may limit teachers’ opportunity to capitalize on students’ understandings during the lesson. An inquiry-based approach encourages ongoing opportunities for students to share understandings and for teachers to respond and differentiate throughout the learning experience. For example, in the lesson design process, teachers should anticipate moments where students may demonstrate higher-level thinking skills and/or high-potential behaviors, as well as moments when misconceptions and potential struggle may arise. Intentionally anticipating these instances provides the teacher the chance to plan ahead for ways to support and provide additional challenge or extension.

While engaged in learning experiences, students may demonstrate indicators of a range of high-potential behaviors, such as perceptive, strategic, communicative, resourceful, creative, curious, leadership, and resilient behaviors. These high-potential behaviors are connected to students’ ability to learn, apply knowledge, show creativity, and demonstrate motivation (Horn, 2015; Shaklee, 2002) and therefore can indicate a need for challenge or extension. A critical part of this discussion is recognizing that the behaviors may look different across students. Teachers can think about what they might expect from students based on what they know of students’ background and recognize when the students are showing behaviors that are exceptional based on that understanding (Horn et al., 2021).

Planning Ways to Respond to Student Understanding

Once opportunities for observing student understanding are identified during the lesson planning process, teachers should plan how they would respond when they notice that students are finding a task too easy or have advanced understanding of the content, in addition to when students are struggling in ways that are unproductive (e.g., showing frustration). The goal here is for teachers to plan to respond to students’ understanding in ways that enable all students to engage in productive struggle (NCTM, 2014). Practically, this may look like teachers writing strategies and questions directly into lesson plans that represent these types of responses to students’ thinking. This helps with maintaining high expectations and providing appropriate levels of challenge and support.

To prepare for responding to students who have demonstrated advanced understanding and/or the task is too easy for them, teachers should plan ways to re-engage students with productive struggle by increasing challenge. Differentiation strategies include providing higher-level or more complex questions, problems, or examples for students to explore, investigate, and discuss. In mathematics, for example, if students are exploring ways to create different representations of a number (e.g., ten frames, base-ten blocks), teachers could ask the students to evaluate their representations to develop one that they think none of their classmates would use. This would encourage flexibility and originality in thinking. Similarly, in literacy, students who demonstrate that they are able to make strong text-to-self connections about a text the class has read could be asked to extrapolate beyond themselves to connect the text to other texts the class has read, or to situations happening in the world. These connections allow students to demonstrate perceptiveness by looking for commonalities among themes and plots across multiple texts to better understand how authors use these literary elements to build meaning.

To prepare for responding to students who are struggling with tasks or concepts in unproductive ways, teachers should be mindful to be supportive, but not provide too much help and therefore overtaking students’ thinking (Jacobs et al., 2014; Rodgers, 2017). Instead teachers could plan to use strategies such as asking metacognitive questions to help students reflect on their thinking. They also can help students identify what is causing them to struggle and encourage them to think about the process and not just about determining a correct answer (Warshauer, 2015). For example, when exploring a problem students may become frustrated if they do not know where to begin. Instead of telling the student what the first step should be, a teacher can ask questions to determine student understanding of the problem and follow up with a question such as, “If you are trying to figure out …, what strategy that we’ve learned might you try?” For students struggling with a reading passage, teachers should encourage the use of metacognition to evaluate which reading strategies they have already tried, and which reading strategy they might try next Table 1.

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Table 1.

Grade 1 Literacy Lesson Example.

Phase of the 5E Model	Lesson Tasks
Engage	At the onset of the lesson, students are asked to think about what they think the word “love” means. They are invited to share their ideas with a partner.
Explore	Students move into small groups with a copy of the book Love and view the pictures as the teacher reads aloud. Throughout the book, the teacher asks students to talk with their group about how the author shows love using the pictures or the phrases. At times, groups are asked to share their thoughts, which the teacher can record on chart paper or the board.
Explain	After reading, the teacher asks the students to use the new information from the book to consider again their definition of love. With a partner, students once again discuss and refine their thinking.
Elaborate	Using their working definition, each student creates a book page that uses both text and illustration to show their definition of love. Students who show high potential can create their page using words and a picture after viewing pages 29–30 to respond to the question, “If you are looking at yourself in the mirror and see the face staring back, what would that ‘love’ look like?” Students who need writing support might be given a sentence frame similar to this: “To me love looks like_______, love feels like _________, and love sounds like __________.”
Evaluate	After completing their book pages, students gather to learn from others’ point of view. Students share their page and see how their ideas are similar to and different from those of their peers.

Sample Literacy Lesson

In the lesson “What Love is to Me,” first graders explore the concept of “Love” based on their own perspective, the perspective of their peers, and also by identifying words and phrases from the text, Love (de la Peña, 2018), that contribute to their understanding. Students refine their definition of love throughout the lesson, thinking about different points of view and gathering information from various sources to connect to their own ideas. The tasks in this lesson are aligned to the Common Core ELA Literacy Standard RL.1.4—“Identify words and phrases in stories or poems that suggest feelings or appeal to the senses.”

Using the 5E Model in this lesson allows students to rethink and refine their definition and helps teachers determine which students are grasping the concept at a more advanced level. During the Explore and Explain phases, for example, a teacher might notice that students are finding relevant details from the words and pictures to describe and elaborate on how the author shows love, and recognizing the ways in which peers’ definitions of love are similar to and different from their own. One teacher reflected,

The kids enjoyed [sharing] their view point of love. The abstract idea of love is difficult for them to understand but some children were able to say love is kindness or friendship, not just playing with my dog. One student said, “Treat people how you want to be treated.” Love means happy. Those children were my deeper thinkers. The students were able to talk about the feelings they saw in the book. (Teacher 48, Lesson Reflection, Nov. 19, 2021)

Those students who are able to identify and explain patterns that emerge across those definitions are demonstrating perceptive thinking in a way that may indicate readiness for additional challenge. In the Elaborate phase, individual students contribute a book page of their own and may include the different definitions across individuals. Students who show understanding of different perspectives might be invited to think about those connections among many people, or within oneself. Another teacher noted, “When students gathered together to show their perspective of love. I noticed very in depth conversation and discussion describing each person’s perspective and view on love. I also was able to hear students make connections or share respectable [sic] disagreements” (Teacher 31, Lesson Reflection, June 3, 2022) (Table 2).

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Table 2.

Grade 1 Mathematics Lesson Example.

Phase of the 5E Model	Lesson Tasks
Engage	To prepare students to engage with the mathematics content, the teacher displays the number “37” and asks students to describe what they know about the number. All student ideas are welcome, but the teacher emphasizes the ideas students share that are related to place value since this will be the focus of the lesson.
Explore	In pairs, students use what they already know to work on representing two-digit numbers using base-ten blocks. To determine the two-digit number to represent, students roll two ten-sided dice—one that has the numbers 1–10 and another that has the numbers 0–90 (in multiples of 10).
Explain	The students and teacher discuss the representations students created with the base-ten blocks. Ultimately, in this discussion and through the students’ examples, the teacher explains concepts related to place value, such as the value of a digit in the ones and tens place and that the digit in each place represents the number of tens and ones in a number.
Elaborate	Students build on their understanding of the place value concepts by playing a strategic game, the goal of which is to reach a target number on a 120-chart without going over it. On each turn, students decide to roll either the 1–10 or the 0-90 die to move towards the target number. If the result of the roll is that students go over the target number, they lose that turn. The complexity of the game can be increased by altering the rules so that students may decide to roll one of the dice multiple times within one turn. However, if students go over the target number after a roll, they lose that turn.
Evaluate	To evaluate students’ understanding of the place value concepts, teachers first invite discussion of how students made their decisions while playing the game. They then analyze a sample game board for a fictional student to determine which decisions the student had made about rolling the dice and the outcome of each roll. Students explain if they would have made the same or different decisions during the game.

Sample Mathematics Lesson

This first-grade lesson engages students in exploring place value and the understanding that the value of each digit is determined by its place in a number. They play a game that requires them to think strategically about place value to reach a target number. The lesson aligns with the Common Core Mathematics Standard 1. NBT.B.2—“Understand that the two digits of a two-digit number represent amounts of tens and ones” (NGA & CCSSO, 2010).

In this sample mathematics lesson, students may demonstrate indicators of high potential while planning and making decisions. Some students may recognize patterns and key details as they represent numbers in different ways in the Explore phase, thus showing perceptive thinking and potential readiness for additional challenge and complexity. During the Elaborate phase, students may show strategic thinking in how they reason and make decisions before rolling the dice in the game. When students demonstrate these behaviors, the teacher can differentiate the follow-up task by increasing the complexity of the game rules, as described above. This increased complexity of the game responds to the students’ needs by further engaging students in thinking strategically about the content because they now have to make multiple decisions on each turn, re-evaluate the situation after each roll, and consider the likelihood of rolling a 0–9 or 10–90 number that will result in losing a turn.

Following the development of this lesson, four of the teachers in the study taught the lesson with all of the first-grade students in their classes and reflected on the high-potential behaviors, types of thinking, and the productive struggle that students displayed or engaged in. One teacher mentioned that while playing the game, students

were using more decision making skills as they saw the consequences of their decisions. For example, at first most wanted to use the tens dice until they noticed that for a lot of their target numbers they had a greater chance of going over their target number if they rolled using that dice (Teacher 30, Lesson Reflection, June 3, 2022)

Multiple teachers commented that having to make a choice about which die to use to reach the target number on each turn caused some “great thinking” and “productive struggle” for students. Teachers reported following up with these students by asking them to further explain their thinking to their partners and to increase the complexity of the game by introducing three-digit numbers and playing the game with a 200-chart.