Which ideas or practices in the video and reading seem most important to you as a teacher for your students?

Two ideas from the article stood out to me as essential for student learning. The first idea was that student modeling should focus on processes - they should be dynamic so that the models can be used to answer questions fuel ideas for experiments. While this was touched on in class, the article made clear that merely constructing a model of a cell is not nearly a rich a learning experience as constructing a model of the process of cell division, for example,

Another idea in the article was that modeling activities be embedded within a context or used to answer an authentic question. Not only does this give all students the opportunity to engage in scientific practices, but it also helps English language learners because the context works as a type of scaffold. This scaffold does not focus on form, but rather process; therefore, this scaffold allows for increased rigor.