Students are often perplexed when asked to reason about things they cannot see—forces, fields, pressures, energy flows. Superstructures helps students wrestle with these ideas in a collaborative setting, learning from themselves and from others. We pulled together three ready-to-use examples that guide students to surface the invisible and turn abstract ideas into patterns they can explain. Take a look!
Ever watch students try to reason about something they can’t actually see? Forces are a classic culprit. This playful Columns structure helps students link everyday moments—dropping a phone, static cling, a compass needle snapping north—with the invisible forces behind them. Suddenly the abstract snaps into recognizable patterns they can sort, compare, and talk about. Use this structure in your classroom!
Students love spotting unusual traits in nature—but figuring out why those traits exist is where the real insight happens. With this Connect structure, students trace real organisms to the invisible environmental pressures that shaped them. Step by step, the hidden driver—selection pressure—becomes a clear, traceable chain of cause and effect. Use this structure in your classroom!
Give students six Earth phenomena and they’ll see six separate ideas. Help them map the forces underneath, and a whole system starts to take shape. Using this Web structure, students connect Earth phenomena like convection currents, the Coriolis effect, and greenhouse gas interactions. What once felt isolated becomes a dynamic network of energy moving through Earth’s systems. Use this structure in your classroom!
These three examples focus on Physics, Biology and Earth Science, but the approach—helping students uncover and reason about things they cannot see—works anywhere. And with Soop’s Structure Starter, you can instantly generate a menu of structures tailored to fit tomorrow’s lesson.