Ambitious Science Teaching

In the spirit of our recent book review blog series, we turn our attention to one of the most widely read and transformative works in the field, Ambitious Science Teaching by Mark Windschitl, Jessica Thompson, and Melissa Braaten. This book challenges teachers to rethink what it means to truly engage students in science learning. Rather than focusing on memorizing facts or completing isolated labs, the authors invite us to create classrooms where all students actively figure out scientific ideas through inquiry, collaboration, and evidence-based reasoning.

Ambitious Science Teaching centers around four key practices:

1. Planning for Engagement with Big Ideas – Choosing powerful science concepts and anchoring lessons in meaningful, real-world phenomena.

   
   

2. Eliciting Students’ Ideas – Making students’ initial thinking visible as the foundation for learning.

   
   

3. Supporting Ongoing Changes in Thinking – Helping students revise and refine their explanations through evidence, modeling, and discourse.

   
   

4. Pressing for Evidence-Based Explanations – Guiding students to use data and reasoning to communicate and defend their ideas.

Windschitl and his co-authors emphasize that ambitious teaching is not about flashy demonstrations or rigid lesson plans, instead it’s about cultivating a classroom culture where students feel safe to share ideas, wrestle with uncertainty, and build understanding together.

For teachers striving to make science learning more inclusive, meaningful, and authentic, Ambitious Science Teaching offers both a vision and a toolkit. It reminds us that science teaching at its best is not about giving answers, but about helping students figure things out for themselves.