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. |
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