Phenomena

I was recently reading the July/August 2026 issue of "Science and Children" a publication of the National Science Teaching Association. In this issue I read the section "Teaching Teachers" written by Lin Xiang, Kristin Cook, Caitlin Ousley, Stephanie Harmon, and Corinne Lardy. They wrote an article entitled "Using a Tool to Demystify the Complexity of Choosing Anchoring Phenomena." The Next Generation Science Standards emphasize that making sense of phenomena in the natural and human-affected world is at the core of all science learning. Teachers should not merely use a phenomenon as a "hook" or confirmation of certain scientific concepts but use it to anchor their students' learning throughout a unit of instruction to make sense of the phenomenon. These phenomena are known as anchoring phenomena.