The Learning Cycle offers just such a pedagogical approach in which instruction is organized in a manner that establishes the purpose and usefulness of lesson content early in the lesson with real-life contexts, involves students actively in the learning process, provides opportunities for connecting lesson content to real life applications, and gets students to “experience” science the way real scientists do and problem-solving the way real engineers do. The Learning Cycle approach is a “continuous” instructional process but for the sake of understanding it better, we will consider it in terms of 5 specific phases described below. Table 1 below indicates the alignment between these phases of the Learning Cycle and the Scientific and Engineering Practices deemed essential in A Framework for K-12 Science Education (2012), which form the foundation for STEM-oriented instruction.