I want my students to “take risks” when learning but I am not sure how to start.
Alicia, Mississippi

We must deliver science content differently by modeling for our students that risk-taking is encouraged in the classroom. You can encourage risk-taking through differentiation. Think about three components that I call the “C.I.A. of Differentiation:” Content, Investigation and Assessment. As the teacher, you are the “director” of learning (pun intended). It is your mission to provide a learning environment in which students take an active part in the learning process. This means that you have to make teaching and learning not only engaging for them but for you too. Rethink your role as the teacher. You are not expected to know everything; however, you are expected to establish a safe learning environment where mistakes are permitted if students learn from them. Your content knowledge is important but it can be just as important for you to model the strategies you use when you do not know an answer. As you guide students to the information they need, they pose questions. Allow students to investigate, gathering information that will help them solve problems or validate established theories. Student products or assessments are concrete evidence of the learning that has taken place. Allowing students to demonstrate their knowledge through a choice of blogs, news reports, debates or posters keeps your classroom creative and relevant. Students feel safe to express themselves without judgment when they have choice. Bringing the “C.I.A.” to your classroom is risky but worth it. With this mindset, you develop skilled, science-conscious scholars willing to question ideas and design answers to help make a better place to live.

I teach advanced science courses. Many of my students see school as a competition so they just want the correct answers to study for a good grade. How do I help build student ownership for learning in my science classroom?
–Chelia, Louisiana

Student ownership of learning is a paradigm shift for the teacher as well as the student. We develop this shift by preparing lessons with the end in mind. We must ask ourselves, “What do I want my students to learn from this unit?” As we plan with a conceptual mindset, our instructional strategies and activities must align with this thought process. Instead of fill-in-the-blank notes and worksheets, we plan for students to do more meaningful and creative tasks that will engage them in the content as we facilitate their learning.
Building scientific content knowledge is important and learning appropriate terminology is crucial so graphic organizers—such as the Frayer Model in which students write a word’s definition, restate in their own words, draw a picture, then give an example of its usage—makes the students responsible for comprehension. We must ask our students, “What are you learning?” instead of “What are you doing?” Posting, “What am I learning and how does it apply to me?” in your classroom is a fundamental reminder for both educators and students. As teachers, we must plan opportunities for students to process and apply knowledge, not simply recite or regurgitate information. Yes, science is innately an active subject, but most importantly, science is a way of thinking where we ask questions, gather information to make informed decisions, and apply our knowledge toward the betterment of our society.

I have written a lab about quarks. The problem is there are no Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) about quarks. The only standards that refer to the nucleus is about protons and neutrons. How can I align my lab with standards that don’t exist?

—Gary, Illinois

This is a great question which leads to the purpose of performance expectations (What are students to learn?) for states that have adopted NGSS and other states using their own state science standards. In either case, students will have a comprehensive assessment and it is important that we, as teachers, follow a trifecta of alignment with 1.) performance expectations, 2.) instructional delivery and 3.) assessment. I’m sure you designed a great lab on quarks and I would never negate your hard work and time, but if there is no performance expectation written, then I suggest you hold off on scheduling the lab. You are ultimately charged with preparing your students for successful understanding of the performance expectations. Instructional time is sacred. Whether your students are assessed by an end of course exam, semester final, or other performance task, you want your students ready.

To help keep focused on that goal, try planning backwards: Find out when your culminating assessment is scheduled. Then think about your school calendar. When are your formative and summative assessments? When do your terms end? What days do you know that little instruction will happen due to assemblies or school-wide events? Include these dates on your teaching calendar to help map out the time you have to teach all of the significant performance expectations within your designed units of study. Planning is key!

I’m a first-year high school science teacher seeking desperately the best way to connect with my freshman biology students who are very smart but are not use to being pushed to comprehend a rigorous curriculum. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

—Chelsea, Texas

The 5E model of science instruction is based on the following components: 1.) Engage, 2.) Explore, 3.) Explain, 4.) Elaborate and 5.) Evaluate. As you build upon your pedagogy, I suggest you first emphasize the engage part of the 5 E. This component is a good starting point because it helps students learn to ask questions and not assume every answer will be handed to them. This “microwave generation” wants answers now but if we do not challenge them to ponder the “what ifs” of life, then our students will not develop into young scholars able to innovate and create—making life more effective, efficient, economical, and interesting.

Engaging them with a question or asking them to work in a group to develop a graphic organizer can generate thoughts of what they already know, what they would like to know, and how they know they understand the concept, which also sparks interest and helps students to think in terms of how this applies to “me” and our world. Engagement leads to exploration that facilitates application. Engaged thoughts should lead students to define specific questions they are curious to answer. Gaining knowledge for themselves will develop their own explanation of phenomena that we, as science teachers, can elaborate on. We can clarify misconceptions, fill gaps of information and finally help them evaluate ways to make society better.

Just as numerals marking the number of in-school days are sometimes posted in one long line stretching across walls of the classroom, weather data can be collected and posted throughout the year. Using symbols that both children and scientists recognize, children can document the weather they experience. Collecting weather data over the year or at least several months will be more meaningful than “doing” weather for a week or taking an occasional nature walk.

See the Early Years column, The Wonders of Weather, in the January 2013 issue of Science and Children and the NSTA Connections archived data collection templates for your children to use as they make actual weather observations outdoors, describe and document them, creating data they can reflect on later to look for patterns.

Seeing the weather observation data represented visually makes it easier to notice patterns in changing temperatures, number of cloudy days, and the relationship between clouds and precipitation. Children’s documented evidence will be a topic of discussion and the basis for developing math skills over time. Arguing for a “claim,” or knowledge statement, based on evidence is described in “Methods and Strategies: Claims and Evidence” by Julie Jackson, Annie Durham, Sabrina Dowell, Jessica Sockel, and Irene Boynton in the December 2016 Science and Children.  With wonderful classroom examples they describe how first through fifth grade children learn to make scientific claims based on their evidence. Instead of asking “Why?” to prompt children to further explain their reasoning, they suggest teachers ask “Because…?” because it is less threatening and “It invites the children to tell me more, to elaborate upon ideas, to support claim statements with evidence.” 

Collecting plant growth data is another way to observe weather. With a title that describes the goal of the article, “Never Too Young to be a Citizen Scientist: Kindergarteners learn about plants and seasons through a yearlong project” (October 2019 Science and Children) authors Mary Hatton, Sara Grimbilas, Caroline Kane, and Tara Kenyon describe how their “Tulip Test Garden” meets goals for learning about plants, living things, weather, and seasonal changes.

The project was inspired by Journey North, with an additional goal of “to help scientists learn when spring happens in our town.” During the months-long project children observe tulip bulbs, learn how to plant them, measure plant growth and record it with drawings and tally charts, learn about parts of plants, engage in science talk, raise their own questions, make inferences, explanations, and predictions, notice patterns, and compare data from previous years with their data to discuss the timing of spring. The authors note that over time, “students become more independent, helping to give out rulers, measuring, and sharing data on their own,” an additional reason to engage children in an on-going long term science project. 

Observing and documenting weather and changes to plants (phenology observations) over several months and seasons can begin at anytime during the year. See citizen science projects of many kinds around the world at SciStarter, an online community dedicated to improving the citizen science experience for project managers and participants. Search for projects that you and your students can participate in by using the project finder and specifying your requirements and preferences for age group, topic, and area of the world. Observe and document ants, buds, dogs, clouds, eelgrass, fish…

Other sites to find citizen science projects to participate in include California Academy of Sciences, Friends of the Assabet River National Wildlife Refuge, Iowa Conservation Education Coalition, Mass Audubon, and Nature Groupie among others. Search citizen science projects to find one that fits your students and will support them in using science practices along with opportunities to develop their literacy and math, and other skills.

My colleagues and I began using units intentionally designed for the NGSS for biology in early 2017. We started with a high-quality unit evaluated by my colleagues on the Science Peer Review Panel, and eventually used a full program from the unit’s developers. We were immediately impressed with the coherence and relevance of the curriculum, which resulted in an extreme increase in student engagement. Students who were not traditionally successful in science were exploring content deeply and asking questions, and they were participating in small- and large-group discussions in ways we hadn’t been able to motivate before.

However, we were still developing our understanding of three-dimensional assessment tasks, and everyone was becoming anxious about the lack of scores in the gradebook. So we created some “traditionally” formatted quizzes. Despite their level of engagement and the multiple ways students showed understanding during discussion, many did not score as well as expected. Eventually, our students’ enthusiasm for science decreased to the level it was before we implemented the new units. Getting a low score, especially on the content they had been deeply interested in and felt they knew, reinforced students’ previous belief that they were not good at science.

We realized the issue was not the materials, but the assessments we were using. Over the next year, our department learned as much as we could about equitable assessment practices and began exploring standards-based grading.

Challenges in Implementing Standards-Based Grading

Previously, we would spend lots of time unpacking standards to create learning targets in the form of “I can” statements. We quickly realized that these “I can” statements, which described what students were about to learn, were at odds with the key innovations of the NGSS that ask students to use the science and engineering practices and crosscutting concepts to uncover the key science ideas. Similarly, it was challenging to create rubrics that didn’t reveal what students were supposed to figure out, yet were still effective at helping students understand where they needed to focus to improve.

The biggest challenge was the lack of time necessary to do this work before teaching the content. Deciding on learning targets, determining assessment opportunities, designing three-dimensional rubrics for those opportunities, and clearly defining grade-band expectations is no small task. As the year progressed, we also needed time to ensure teachers’ scoring was calibrated, and of course, we had to find time to give students meaningful feedback. We were incredibly lucky to have used high-quality NGSS-designed materials with a team of committed teachers collaborating in Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) to help make these tasks less formidable.

The Synergy of Purpose-Driven PLCs

Our department was fortunate to have access to a large amount of quality professional learning as the NGSS were being implemented.

As a PLC, our team was able to increase our capacity to meet these challenges. We pooled our expertise, time, and resources to create a system that would help educators to both build confidence in students and give our team some data on their learning:

We employed high-quality materials to support our work. Using the assessment overview document provided within the Biology Storylines program, our content-level PLC created three-dimensional, single-point rubrics intended to measure a student’s proficiency and understanding during the chosen task in a way that doesn’t reveal any key ideas students have not yet developed. As we create these rubrics, and reflect on how we use them, they have become living documents that we are constantly refining.

We also meet as content-level PLCs to reflect on student work and “buddy score” student responses to calibrate expectations for scoring. These rich discussions have not only helped clarify what we expect students to be able to do at different high school grade levels, but also have helped teachers become more comfortable with the innovations and expectations of these new standards.

Early Evidence of Success

With our new assessment system, we find that student confidence is increasing, and they’re remaining engaged and excited throughout the cycles of “figuring out” all year. Not only have students been more engaged, but we’ve also seen evidence of early success on the Science Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress (M-STEP) assessment.

On the state test, previously unmotivated students commented about how they learned something new from the interesting phenomena presented on the test, and they were motivated to continue testing for additional days to finish the exam. That anecdotal evidence seems to corroborate with how our students’ scores have changed relative to scores of other students in Michigan.

Our PLC work has been key in making our assessments more equitable, and I look forward to continuing to build students’ confidence as scientists.

Students at our school consistently underperformed on the state science exam. 15.8% of students at our school scored above the benchmark for proficiency in 2015–16, and only 13.5% scored about the benchmark in 2016–17, compared to 33% and 33.8% of students in Michigan for the same years.

This pilot test released data to districts, but did not release the scores publicly. Additionally, no benchmark for proficiency was released to schools, so these metrics are not directly comparable to the scores from previous years. However, even considering the average percentage of test questions students answered correctly at our school relative to the average across the state, the relative gains are promising.

Holly Hereau is a science educator at BSCS, an adjunct biology professor at Macomb Community College in Warren, Michigan, and Mott Community College in Flint, and is a member of Achieve’s Science Peer Review Panel. She previously taught high school biology, chemistry, and environmental science in Redford, Michigan, for 15 years. Hereau has worked with educators across the country to support implementation of high-quality NGSS-designed units developed by the Next Generation Science Storylines and inquiryHub teams. She holds a BS in biology from Grand Valley State University and studied entomology at Michigan State University before earning a master’s degree in education at the University of Michigan. As a proponent of five-dimensional learning, she is passionate about providing experiential and place-based opportunities for students. Connect with her on Twitter at @hhereau.

Note: This article is featured in the December 2019 issue of Next Gen Navigator, a monthly e-newsletter from NSTA delivering information, insights, resources, and professional learning opportunities for science educators by science educators on the Next Generation Science Standards and three-dimensional instruction.  Click here to sign up to receive the Navigator every month.

The mission of NSTA is to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.

In June 2013, Kentucky’s Board of Education officially adopted the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), which not only set a new course for science education in Kentucky, but also started me on a new professional journey. As the newly-minted science department lead teacher at my middle school, it fell to me to attend regional rollout meetings, bring the information back to my district, and lead them through NGSS implementation. I discovered that transformative task could only be accomplished with the right ingredients: professional learning networks (PLNs) and an example of high-quality NGSS design.  

At that time, I was already developing the first ingredients: two PLNs that would serve me through the implementation and beyond.

The first PLN I developed centered on my school science department: the team I would lead through NGSS implementation. We were all at different places in our science teaching careers, but we had to unite to plan the implementation of the NGSS in our classrooms.

The second PLN I developed was an informal online group of science teacheDavid rs and experts whose knowledge of NGSS exceeded mine. These were the people, in addition to the Science Peer Review Panel, who would spur my growth in understanding and implementing the NGSS. It was this second PLN that led me to a professional learning session on the EQuIP Rubric for Science, a tool to determine how well materials are designed for the NGSS, and to the Next Generation Science Storylines project.

At the EQuIP Rubric training, I was introduced to the idea of centering units around phenomena for students to figure out, and to the idea of building a coherent storyline around the phenomenon.

Following this training, the power of my school PLN really blossomed. The other seventh-grade science teacher, Katie, and I worked to overhaul the seventh-grade curriculum to align it to the NGSS. It was still early in the life of the NGSS, and most of us were grappling with including the Science and Engineering Practices and shifting content among grade levels. Figuring out phenomena was not yet at the forefront of the district’s curriculum process, but Katie and I accomplished more together than we could have alone. My preferred teaching style complemented hers, and we both were determined that our students would succeed with the NGSS. We were making great progress.

While the curriculum we designed may have addressed the progressions in the NGSS, we weren’t yet reaching the full intent of the standards. We realized the additional ingredient we really needed for the NGSS vision to became real: to try out an example of a high-quality unit designed for the NGSS in our classrooms.

We first used version 1.0 of the Next Gen Storyline unit How Can We Sense So Many Different Sounds From a Distance?, which had been designated as a quality work in progress by some of my colleagues on the Science Peer Review Panel. It was this unit that helped us realize what it meant to lead with an engaging phenomenon that would drive student learning. In this unit, students discover how sound travels from a record player to the listener by using a sewing needle and a paper cone to produce sound from vinyl records and ultimately realizing that vibrations produce sounds and that the characteristics of the vibrations determine what kinds of sounds are produced. Version 1.0 of this unit was little more than a skeleton outline that briefly described each lesson, so Katie and I had a great deal of work to do to upgrade it, and we struggled—a lot. After some revision from the developers, though, Version 2.1 of this unit earned the NGSS Design Badge.

Our experience teaching with this unit crystalized in our minds the NGSS vision. We couldn’t return to a traditional teach-lab-test method of science instruction. We began to creatively embed phenomena in our units so that students investigating phenomena would drive the learning. Since I collaborated with Katie, I have changed grades and schools, but I have always tried to keep the NGSS vision front and center: that vision that was shared through PLNs, paired with high-quality units that scored well on the EQuIP Rubric.

In my transformation to an NGSS science teacher, the key ingredients were a PLN of experts to push me, a PLN of colleagues to productively struggle with me, and an example of high-quality NGSS design.

Please comment below! What kind of awesome can you cook up with these three ingredients in your practice?

David Grossman is a National Board–certified science teacher currently teaching high school biology in Kentucky. This is his 19th year in public education. For much of his career, he taught middle school science. He has supported the NGSS rollout at the school, local, and state level. He participates in the Center for Disease Control’s Science Ambassadors program, which is helping him introduce public health issues in his classroom. Grossman is a former member of Achieve’s Science Peer Review Panel, and he still works with Achieve to evaluate lessons and units using the EQuIP Rubric for Science. Connect with him on Twitter at @tkSciGuy.

Note: This article is featured in the December 2019 issue of Next Gen Navigator, a monthly e-newsletter from NSTA delivering information, insights, resources, and professional learning opportunities for science educators by science educators on the Next Generation Science Standards and three-dimensional instruction.  Click here to sign up to receive the Navigator every month.

The mission of NSTA is to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.

“I’m not good at science.” It’s a declaration that far too many students have made in classrooms. Their beliefs are often based on lack of exposure to science, not their true potential to do science. So how do we change their minds and get them to believe they have the capacity to succeed in science? As the PreK–12 Science Coordinator for a school district of more than 11,000 students in 17 different schools, it’s a question I grapple with regularly.

The U.S. Department of Education has invested upward of $200 million in high-quality science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education and knows “STEM education is a pathway to successful careers, and [the Department] is committed to ensuring equal access to a strong STEM education for all students.” To get there, our youngest students require consistent opportunities to form the foundational skills and knowledge needed to progress to higher levels of thinking that develop over time. This need is clearly described in the grounding research of the Framework for K–12 Science Education: “Building progressively more sophisticated explanations of natural phenomena is central throughout grades K–5, as opposed to focusing only on description in the early grades and leaving explanations to later grades.”

We know it’s important that all children have equal access and support in science, but what are the effective strategies to accomplish this? Research shows “the most promising strategy for sustained, substantive school improvement is developing the ability of school personnel to function as professional learning communities.”

A focus on equity, access, and continuous improvement is needed to enhance instruction. As a member of Achieve’s Science Peer Review Panel (Science PRP), I’ve worked with some of the nation’s foremost experts on three-dimensional teaching and learning. That experience readied me to meet the challenge of leading Greece Central School District in the transition to three-dimensional science teaching and learning in a way that minimized the need for teachers to be out of the classroom.

I launched a Science Leadership Team made up of a group of self-selected elementary school teachers and administrators interested in learning more about the new science standards and willing to share their learning with district teachers to help their colleagues.

Together with these teacher leaders, we mapped out a plan to support all the elementary teachers in the district. Leaders from the Science Leadership Team were given two weeks, which we called a “cycle,” to meet with grade-level colleagues from different buildings, resulting in the same learning shared districtwide by the end of each cycle.

The Science Leadership Team met for two full days before a new cycle began to make sure they were prepared. The first day concentrated on new learning for the team. My involvement with the Science PRP proved invaluable because I shared case studies and lessons deemed “high-quality” using the EQuIP Rubric for Science as well as other material grounded in best practice.

On the second day, I introduced the group to a 45-minute learning opportunity that the Science Leadership Team members, in pairs of two, would use when they met with grade-level teachers across the district. The team was invited and encouraged to work together to examine the learning opportunity and make it better. As a result, team members improved the experience and felt prepared to lead a group, and every teacher received the same high-quality learning.

I believe hope lies in communicating, collaborating, and forming a professional learning community that exhibits research-based characteristics to be effective, including “an environment that fosters mutual cooperation, emotional support, and personal growth as they work together to achieve what they cannot accomplish alone.” NSTA and Achieve are providing resources, such as those high-quality examples from the Science PRP, that can guide districts as they progress in their understanding and implementation of three-dimensional teaching and learning for all of our nation’s children.

I am honored to lead my district forward in full implementation of the New York State Science Learning Standards, which are based on the Next Generation Science Standards. I hope our efforts will help change the paradigm. By engaging students earlier with good science instruction, they will see their potential to do science, and we, as educators, will help them achieve what they hought was impossible.

Dr. Edel Maeder is the preK–12 science coordinator for the Greece Central School District (GSCD), the 10th-largest district in New York State. Before becoming a district-level administrator, she taught secondary science for more than 20 years. Her certifications include biology, Earth science, chemistry, and general science. She is a member of the GCSD Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment and leads a variety of professional learning activities. She is a member of the New York State Science Content Advisory Panel, NSTA’s 3-D Professional Learning Cadre Community, and Achieve’s Peer Review Panel. Maeder is committed to supporting educators in three-dimensional teaching so all students benefit from three-dimensional learning. Connect with her via Twitter at @EdelMaederSTEAM.

Note: This article is featured in the December 2019 issue of Next Gen Navigator, a monthly e-newsletter from NSTA delivering information, insights, resources, and professional learning opportunities for science educators by science educators on the Next Generation Science Standards and three-dimensional instruction.  Click here to sign up to receive the Navigator every month.

The mission of NSTA is to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.