In April 2013, Achieve, in partnership with The Lead States, released the Next Generation Science Standards. These standards and The Framework, from which they were constructed, provided a new vision for science education across the country. As we launched NGSS in Kentucky, we were focused on elevating the position of the SEPs and CCCs so that they were just as important as what we typically called "content" (i.e. the DCIs). We focused heavily on the SEPs and how students would best learn science when they were doing science--at the intersection of the three dimensions.
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In April 2013, Achieve, in partnership with The Lead States, released the Next Generation Science Standards. These standards and The Framework, from which they were constructed, provided a new vision for science education across the country. Back in my day (when the NGSS was first adopted in Kentucky in 2013), we weren't used to seeing performance expectations (PE). I remember debates around what constituted a standard. Was it just the PE or the entire page. Were the foundation boxes included? What about the appendices? Which parts of the NGSS had been codified into law in Kentucky? I'm not sure why we were concerned about this other than the potential impact on assessment (which was and is a big deal in education). MS-LS1-1 Develop a model to describe how food is rearranged through chemical reactions forming new molecules that support growth and/or release energy as this matter moves through an organism. The PE shown above looks like something that I could easily teach my students. "Here's a model of photosynthesis and cellular respiration. Be ready to regurgitate it on an exam." Except this PE asks students to develop the model. If I teach them a pre-existing model then they have no need to develop their own models. And suddenly the complexity of the PEs became apparent. I began to realize that they were endpoints of instruction that could almost serve as assessment prompts. And slowly we realized that regardless of how we defined the standards, we were going to need those foundation boxes and the appendices in order to help our students reach the intent of the PEs.In April 2013, Achieve, in partnership with The Lead States, released the Next Generation Science Standards. These standards and The Framework, from which they were constructed, provided a new vision for science education across the country. In the spring of 2013, I made the decision to leave the school library and return to the middle school science classroom. An unexpected consequence of this move was my being positioned on the front lines of the rollout of the standards in Kentucky (one of the lead states and early adopters of the NGSS). I've been doing this work at the middle and high school level for 10 years. This summer is, then, a great time to reflect on how far we've come since those first days of the NGSS.
I started my teaching career as an elementary teacher and I spent several years as a school librarian, so literacy is fully embedded in my "wheelhouse." Often, in the summer, I try to read one or more texts about reading or writing. This summer one of those texts is The Confidence To Write: A Guide for Overcoming Fear and Developing Identity as a Writer by Liz Prather (another Kentucky teacher). In the book, she asks (and answers) a common question among writing teachers, "How do we get our kids to be real writers?" The short answer is that writers write and to get kids to be real writers, they need to write. (Spoiler alert: Kids already do a lot of writing, they just need to recognize how that makes them a writer.)
As I read through the first few chapters, I found myself asking several questions. How does this work in the science classroom? How do we get our students to take on the role of scientists? What does that look like after they leave the classroom? How do we complete this statement: writers write and scientists (insert answer here)? For some students, the answer is easy, scientists become real scientists. They go on to study science in college and work in science fields. But what about the other students? The NGSS has reminded us that science is for all students. What if we filled in the blanks this way: scientists think like scientists? Whether students are in science fields or making decisions in their everyday lives, thinking like a scientist is a skill that will serve them. And like writing, it's a complex skill. Thankfully, the writers of The Framework provided crosscutting concepts to help us see how scientists think. When these are combined with the science and engineering practices, we have a great model of what a scientist does. While I don't expect my students to plan and carry out investigations once they graduate, I do want them to ask questions about the world around them, create and modify mental models about how the world works, and understand how argumentation helps build consensus. I want them to notice patterns and think about cause and effect. They need to be able to dive deeper than "A came before B, and therefore, A must be the cause of B." I want them to notice connections between structure and function and how some things stay the same while others change. While it would be great if they can remember how photosynthesis works and explain where trees get most of their mass, I'm more concerned that they take with them the ability to think (and act) like a scientist. In a writing classroom, writers are often developed using a workshop approach where students work independently, conferring with the teacher, to create something that showcases their emerging abilities. How can we create something like this in the science classroom where there are specific disciplinary core ideas that we must develop and deepen our understanding of? This is where three-dimensional phenomena-based science instruction shines. Students are given opportunities each day to think like scientists as they seek to figure out a phenomenon. (If you need examples of this, check out the examples of high-quality design here.) There's one more idea from The Confidence to Write that I'm still trying to envision in the science classroom. In writing classrooms, teachers can showcase the struggles and successes that come from being a writer by sharing and discussing their own writing projects. These projects don't look that different from the ways students can use writing after they graduate (regardless of their occupations). In science, we can show the struggles of famous (and not-so-famous) scientists, but these struggles are not likely to parallel how students may use science in their everyday lives. The closest I think I can come in my classroom is exploring some phenomena that I don't already know the answer to--starting the unit without reading through to the end to see how things turn out. I usually find myself thinking that thought a lot during the weeks and days leading up to the first day of school. These days are filled with things that are far-removed from science content. We aren't spending days studying content or aligning instructional practices to the shifts in the NGSS. We aren't starting new book studies of NSTA Press books. We aren't planning engaging lessons. We are slogging through online trainings related to personal and psychological safety, attending mental health summits, practicing safe crisis management, looking for new get-to-know-you activities, and the list goes on. And again, I say to myself, "I just want to teach science."
Sometimes, I follow that thought with, "I went to school to be a teacher, not to deal with all of this other stuff." But what I'm beginning to realize is that being a teacher includes all this "other stuff." Incorporating social-emotional learning into the curriculum is not "one more thing;" it is just another aspect of being a teacher. Being a triage nurse and a triage counselor is also another part of being a teacher. We are the ones who hear about emotional and physical injury first. We are the ones who help students advocate for themselves or direct them to other professionals for more help. So I'll continue to expand my definition of teaching to include all of these other essentials, and I'll work to keep high-quality, NGSS-aligned instruction at the center of my classroom. And I'll remind myself that I'm still "teaching" even when we take a detour from the NGSS to address student wellbeing. This summer, I'm participating in the Adolescent Literacy Project through the Louisville Writing Project. Over the first half of the project, I've been reminded of several core principles of literacy. One of the most intuitive and simple ones is that people get better at reading by reading. The volume of students' reading is important. The more they read, the more likely they are to improve as readers. The less they read, the less likely they are to improve. Richard Allington's research supports this as does the new book from Scholastic, Intervention Reinvention, and decades of research. My goal is not to cite all of that research, but to consider it's application in my science classroom.
This past year, I moved to a new school that embraces "no homework" as part of its alternative model. This means that there is no expectation that students will be reading at home. It is also true (in my experience) that many of the students who enroll in alternative schools have difficulties reading on grade level. If both of these are true, then it is essential that across the entire school day, the teachers provide students with opportunities to read and to develop their reading skills. In the past, it has been my practice to spend little time in the science textbook because it doesn't fit with the standards or is too difficult for students to read. I've designed a classroom around the construction of knowledge (explanations) through experiments, talk, and group consensus. All of this aligns with the NGSS, but it does not help students develop their reading skills. To help with this, I am developing text sets to accompany each of the storylines that I'll be teaching next year. Simply put, these text sets give students a variety of opportunities to engage with text and content. By having a variety, students are given choice in selecting the texts that they want to read. A rolling knowledge journal will allow them to track the growth of their content knowledge as they read more texts about the same concepts. Making this a routine part of my class and providing before, during, and after reading strategies should be a great first step in shifting my NGSS classroom to a text-rich, NGSS classroom. I have tried science notebooks before, always with good intentions, but I never achieved all of those good intentions. One of my big issues was control. (All teachers have some control issues, right?) When I’ve used science notebooks in the past, I struggled with kids who “weren’t doing it right.” Students who would write on random pages seeming to lack the understanding that books are read (and created) from front to back, one page at a time. I also struggled with helping students record science knowledge in a meaningful way in the notebook. I think that Mary has answered both of these issues for me in Write, Think, Learn. On page 22, Mary introduces an idea that I used to view as somewhat of a waste of time, but now I see that it’s the key to avoiding some of the madness mentioned above. Mary has each student number every page in the notebook before ever using it. Some of you may be thinking, “but I’ll still have students who don’t put the correct stuff on page 8 with the rest of us.” That’s the beauty of Mary’s index system. Throughout the year, maybe near the end of units, Mary has students index their notebooks, recording all of the page numbers that belong to a specific topic. I can imagine myself saying, “Okay, now I need to you find every page that relates to our Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy storyline. Write DMD in your index and list all of those page numbers there.” While it’s more inconvenient if the student has entries scattered throughout the notebook, he/she can still index all of those entries. I can also imagine adding lines in the index for specific scientific practices or even crosscutting concepts. The easiest of these would be models. You could have students index every page on which they have created a model and periodically add to this line in the index. On page 91, Mary makes a key distinction between note taking and note making. She asserts that note taking is a record of the teacher’s thinking while note making is a record of the student’s thinking. There are several natural places where this idea fits into the storyline approach. The most obvious is in the Incremental Modeling Tracker (IMT) which contains a summary of what is learned in each lesson. In a recent blog post, I discuss using Mary’s What? So What? Now What? format to reflect on each lesson/activity. By having students record their thoughts before discussing them with the group, each student gets a chance to note make before the group offers additional ideas that can be added as note taking (since not everyone will have reached the same conclusions from any given activity or lesson). Even in cases where some Disciplinary Core Idea elements need to be presented via direct instruction, students can use the What? So What? Now What? format to note take in the What? section and note make in the other two sections. We can explain to students that “Systems of specialized cells within organisms help them perform the essential functions of life.” (from LS1.A for high school) and then have students consider “So what does this mean for the phenomenon we are figuring out?” It seems that note taking leads to memorization while note making leads to sense making (the goal of the storyline approach and the vision of the Framework). Mary expands on the theory behind the practice. . .Indexing is a method students can use to take charge of ordering and classifying learning. It should be useful to the student for locating all the ideas around one concept, perhaps for writing a paper or drawing conclusions in the future. I generally reserve several pages at the back of my notebooks for list making of all sorts, generally a recording of ideas which serve my curiosity. This includes listings of books and movies I hear about and want to remember later, or ideas I want to follow up on when I have the time. Encouraging students to do the same honors their individual curiosity, so important in the science classroom. These lists could be used for independent projects initiated by students on a classroom “something cool I learned” sharing day, or to review and explain in a reflection to the teacher about what kind of thinker/scientist they are. About Mary. . .Mary K. Tedrow, NBCT, taught in the high school English classroom beginning in 1978, ending her career as the Porterfield Endowed English Chair at John Handley High School in 2016. She was named the 2000 Frederick County Teacher of the Year and served as a commissioner on the 2010 Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching for the NEA. She is currently the Director of the Shenandoah Valley Writing Project at Shenandoah University in Winchester VA and a DA candidate in English Pedagogy with Murray State University, KY
In my last post, I began addressing the connections that can be made between Mary Tedrow’s book, Write, Think, Learn: Tapping the Power of Daily Student Writing Across the Content Areas with the storyline approach to science instruction that many of us are using. This post continues that line of thinking. Classroom discourse plays a huge role in the storyline classroom (and in many other classrooms not using this approach). For years, I have been using TERC’s Talk Moves to help guide classroom discourse, but I haven’t used writing as an intentional and ongoing scaffold for these discussions. Mary addresses this idea starting on page 49 of her book where she suggests we move from turn and talk (think, pair, share) to write, turn, and talk. In doing so, we allow (force) all students to wrestle with the topic and commit some thinking to paper. We also give them time to write to figure out what they think. I’ve often done things in the classroom to get students to commit to a way of thinking. Sometimes I use 4 corners or an activity like commit and toss, but rarely have I had students do their initial writing in a notebook that they write in daily. This type of writing builds a pattern of thinking and can show students how their thinking develops over time. It can also help them build more solid arguments, as they will be called on to defend their ideas in class. Those whose initial ideas already included evidence and reasoning will be at an advantage and will serve as examples to those who didn’t include evidence. As the year advances and these kinds of discussions occur regularly, more and more students will start including evidence in their initial writing. Another benefit of having students record their initial thoughts in a notebook is that it can help normalize the notion of changing one’s thinking when presented with convincing evidence. This can be achieved by having students return to their before discussion writing and adding a follow-up statement that explains how their thinking changed through the classroom discussion. They may be more convinced of their initial idea through the addition of evidence or they may no longer support their initial idea, having been dismayed by ample evidence. This writing doesn’t have to be graded. It serves to advance the understanding of science content and science as a self-correcting enterprise. A teacher could ask students to lift evidence from the daily notebook to show how their thinking has deepened through the year, if assessment is desired. Otherwise, the evidence of this practice will show up on classroom assessments of the content and in places where students are asked to think like a scientist. Is there a place in your plan for the week that would allow for a little more initial writing before a class discussion? Mary expands on the theory behind the practice. . .Writing before talking honors the introverts in the room. Some process in their heads (introverts). Some process out loud (extroverts). Most classrooms privilege the extroverts and our introverts get lost when they are run over by the extroverts. By writing first, everyone gets time to generate ideas. Even if an extremely shy student chooses not to share, he can still compare and adjust his ideas against others as they talk. If you think you don’t have enough time in the classroom for writing, see how this middle school teacher uses writing in science to get her students engaged in an earth science unit. (There are other great literacy sources at this Annenberg Learner website for reading and writing in the disciplines.) Writing after a discussion is equally important since committing words to paper supports memory. You can prompt this with a simple question: “How has our talking affected you today? Summarize your thinking here.” Collecting this writing for a quick read through will provide you with lots of instructional information but, as David says, it can go ungraded. When students see how writing is used immediately in the classroom, they stop asking about grades. (If you don’t believe me, try it.) About MaryMary K. Tedrow, NBCT, taught in the high school English classroom beginning in 1978, ending her career as the Porterfield Endowed English Chair at John Handley High School in 2016. She was named the 2000 Frederick County Teacher of the Year and served as a commissioner on the 2010 Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching for the NEA. She is currently the Director of the Shenandoah Valley Writing Project at Shenandoah University in Winchester VA and a DA candidate in English Pedagogy with Murray State University, KY.
2020 is ending on a high note for me (not just because it’s ending) because I’m participating in the Morehead Writing Project’s Winter Online Institute in an effort to improve as a writer and to improve my pedagogy by sprinkling in more deliberate writing. As part of my research during the Institute, I discovered Mary Tedrow’s book, Write, Think, Learn: Tapping the Power of Daily Student Writing Across the Content Areas. The more I read, the more excited I became. In collaboration with Mary, I decided to take some of the ideas from the book and apply them to the “storyline” approach to teaching science that I am currently using in my classroom. You can read more about this approach in this Teacher’s Manual and can find examples of it on this website. While this type of instruction is a paradigm shift for science educators as we switch from “teaching about” to having students “figure out,” the results are worth it. It’s also based on years of research into how students best learn science. (Check out A Framework for K12 Science Education, Taking Science to School, or Ready, Set, Science for more on the research.) What follows (in this blog and more to come) are specific suggestions I have for combining storylines and Mary's text into a unified pedagogy in my science classroom. One major component of storylines in my classroom is an initial model. Once students are introduced to the unit phenomenon (the thing we’re going to spend the unit trying to figure out), they are asked to create a model that shows their initial thinking. Typically, I have had students do this in groups, creating large models to share with the class in a gallery walk. What I realized as I read Mary’s book is that there is a benefit in having students create this model in a notebook that they will use daily to capture their thinking. This will allow them later to reflect on their initial ideas and see how their thinking has developed. Their individual models can be shared in small groups, and the groups can develop ideas together that all may choose to add to their own initial models. I have typically asked students to create their model using images and arrows, adding text to clarify things that are not easily apparent in the visuals. What I’ve now realized is that there’s power in having students do some expressive writing (see this blog post for reference of expressive writing) to discover what they think either before or during the model creation. Going forward, I plan to encourage students to use both text and images to create their initial models. Another feature of the storyline approach is the Incremental Modeling Tracker (IMT). This is a tool that helps students track their learning across the unit and apply that learning by modifying their models. I have not yet been successful in implementing this. At the end of a lesson, I’m usually rushing to wrap things up before class ends. I’ve also been using the IMT as a digital document which makes it hard for students to add sketches of the additions they want to make to their model. After reading Mary’s Reflective Question Framework for Adaptation (starts on page 70 if you’re following along at home), I’m convinced I can make the IMT work by making it a What? So What? Now What? writing assignment in the notebook that students will use daily. Taking it from the digital world into the students’ notebooks is key, I think. Students can reflect on what they learned, what implications it has on their model (so what), and then, in true storyline fashion, answer "Now what?" to help decide where the investigation goes next. They also have their modified IMT in the same notebook as their initial model. They can use the IMT to make incremental improvements to their actual initial model, or just keep a record of the changes they need to make when they create their final model. Mary expands on the theory behind the practice. . .Writing is a great way to record one’s thoughts and initial ideas (or hypotheses, as the scientists would say). There are many ways to accommodate this into classroom work. In any course, one can write a Position Paper at the beginning of a unit or course of study. The paper, or entry into the notebook, should be the student’s initial thoughts around the topic, what they think they know, what they think they might learn, and even how they have felt in the past. This acts as a benchmark to weigh further learning against. Students should write it in their own voice and teachers should make it low risk. I explained this writing as “you are talking to your future self since you are the one who will be learning.” This entry can be revisited later to write a Final Position. In some classes I called this a Change paper. Here the student is able to express what has changed in their thinking. The language used in these writings would sound something like this: “At the beginning of this experiment/unit/class I thought….. But when we…..I changed my view. I thought…. Later, I decided that…..Now I think…..” Of course, some of our students may already know a great deal about a topic and they should explain where their thoughts and ideas were confirmed throughout the lessons if little knowledge was advanced. About Mary. . .Mary K. Tedrow, NBCT, taught in the high school English classroom beginning in 1978, ending her career as the Porterfield Endowed English Chair at John Handley High School in 2016. She was named the 2000 Frederick County Teacher of the Year and served as a commissioner on the 2010 Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching for the NEA. She is currently the Director of the Shenandoah Valley Writing Project at Shenandoah University in Winchester, VA and a DA candidate in English Pedagogy with Murray State University, KY.
2020 has been a crazy year for everyone. Almost daily, I find myself thinking, “This isn’t what I signed up for.” Then I remind myself that this isn't what any of us signed up for. The rounds of virtual and hybrid instruction make it hard for us to connect with our students. Staring into a computer monitor filled with blank boxes because no one wants to turn on the camera in the norm for many high school settings across the country. At the beginning of the year, I found myself taking notes about what students said during virtual class sessions so that I could remember details about students I hadn’t yet met. I printed out their pictures from our student information system to have a face with which to associate their comments. It was hard, and it was not fun. When we finally began in person hybrid instruction, the tension eased a bit. This is “what I signed up for,” students in the classroom working together to create meaning. It was somewhat successful, but it was also draining. At the end of every day, we went home exhausted. We were still chasing assignments from the at-home learning that students were assigned when they were not in school. This time was short-lived as we returned to virtual learning on Friday, November 13, 2020. Ironic because Friday, March 13, 2020 was when K12 education in Kentucky first shifted to virtual instruction. With the return to virtual learning came the distance between us again. Although I had met all of my students, the longer virtual schooling continued, the more my focus drifted to trying to get work turned in from students, which left me less time to focus on the actual students. . . until the Morehead Writing Project’s Winter Institute. Just as we were winding down for the semester, I started the four-week Winter Institute, and it inspired me to try something. I posted this writing prompt for my students during one of their at-home learning days. "Take 10-15 minutes to write about anything you choose. It can be about school or not. If you need something to write about, you could choose to write about this question: “What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned from COVID so far?” You could also choose to write about a Christmas memory. There are no wrong answers, and I won’t share your words with anyone else. "The responses I received amazed me. One student who rarely turned in work wrote half a page about his favorite pastime. Other students wrote about the anxiety that they live with regarding COVID-19. Still other students wrote about loved ones who have passed and how Christmas is not the same without them.
While this didn’t solve all of my problems, it did help me see my students as human again. There was little “academic” merit to the writing that the students did. It lacked proper punctuation and capitalization. There were no neat paragraphs, and no tidy dialogue with punctuation. However, that was never the goal. The goal was for my students to express themselves freely and for me to get a glimpse into their lives again. And this goal was achieved (at least for those who did the assignment). This kind of writing is what James Britton calls expressive writing in his book, The Development of Writing Abilities. I came across this in the text Write, Think, Learn by Mary Tedrow. Expressive writing is unpolished writing that results from thinking and results in thinking. It’s getting what’s in our heads onto paper. This is the kind of writing that I’m planning to do more of in the future (both during and after the pandemic). And I plan to use it not only to connect with students but also to develop content knowledge. More ideas for linking expressive writing and the NGSS are coming soon. In the meantime, how are you using writing in your classroom? How might you expand that as we move into 2021? |
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