Teaching Practices That Support Student Sensemaking Across Grades and Disciplines: A Conceptual Review

Sensemaking entails being active, self-conscious, motivated, and purposeful in the world. It is an activity that is always situated within the cultural and historical contexts in which we interact with others and with the aid of tools. In this chapter, we contrast everyday sensemaking with academic sensemaking and treat academic sensemaking in a disciplinary-specific manner, exploring how teachers engage students in academic sensemaking within the domains of mathematics, science, history, and literature. Consistent with the focus of this volume, which is designed to feature teacher practice, the goal of our chapter is to explore the practices in which teachers engage when the purpose is to position students as sensemakers and create a classroom culture that provides the resources and contexts to develop skill with academic sensemaking. Our analyses revealed the broad range of practices necessary to characterize the enactment of instruction that is designed to teach and promote sensemaking, as well as the multitude of purposes those practices served. To explicate the domain-specific nature of teacher practice, we analyzed selected studies in which the researchers provided significant detail regarding teachers’ practices. We conclude that sensemaking is a productive lens for investigating and characterizing great teaching.