By Kate Falk
Posted on 2017-05-26
This week in education news, Idaho releases revamped science standards proposal; two University of Florida professors explain how the taunting of minority students in a robotics competition are part of a cultural idea that minority students don’t belong in STEM classes; new 3-minute videos highlight new research in STEM education; next-generation science tests slowly take shape; and according to the Center on Education Policy, students spend an average of 10 days out of the school year taking district-mandated tests and nine days taking state-required tests.
Idaho Releases Revamped Science Standards Proposal
A state committee has made another attempt to break a deadlock over addressing climate change in Idaho classrooms. But the last word in this controversy belongs to Idaho lawmakers — who removed references to climate change from state science standards earlier this year. The State Department of Education unveiled five new climate change standards with wording designed to address lawmakers’ concerns. Click here to read the article featured in Idaho Ed News.
Keeping Up With STEM In The Classroom
Job readiness and transferable skills are things you don’t typically associate with elementary students. Yet to pursue careers as mechanical engineers or computer scientists as adults, children need to develop their interests in and aptitudes for such fields at an early age. The pressure that schools and teachers face to increase STEM education is real. Starting in 2019, elementary and secondary teachers in Washington state will have to document professional development in STEM in order to renew their teaching certificates. Click here to read the article featured in The Seattle Times.
Minority Students Face Cultural Barriers To STEM Education
Two University of Florida professors, no strangers to the entry barriers for minority students in science, technology, engineering and math fields, explain how the taunting of minority students in a robotics competition are part of a cultural idea that minority students don’t belong in STEM classes. Click here to read the article featured in the Gainesville Sun.
Quick-Hit Videos Highlight New Research In STEM Education
Researchers working on federally funded STEM education projects have created three-minute videos about their efforts, which are now being featured as part of a weeklong virtual event. More than 170 video presentations were submitted for the 2017 NSF STEM for All Video Showcase. The research projects described, most of which are being funded by the National Science Foundation, cover a wide range of topics in science, technology, engineering, and math education, such as using virtual reality to give students field experiences and pairing undergraduates with K-12 students to serve as STEM mentors. Click here to read the article featured in Education Week.
What’s More Important: Credentials or Experience?
Not all teachers are created equally and neither are the programs that made them that way. And so it’s true for administrative licenses and programs as well. Although I’m certain there are important lessons to be learned in the graduate classroom for an administrative license and some may take much away from it, I’m willing to argue that on-the-job training and experience are equally as valuable, if not more. Click here to read the article featured in Education Week.
The Little-Known Statistician Who Taught Us To Measure Teachers
Students enroll in a teacher’s classroom. Nine months later, they take a test. How much did the first event, the teaching, cause the second event, the test scores? Students have vastly different abilities and backgrounds. A great teacher could see lower test scores after being assigned unusually hard-to-teach kids. A mediocre teacher could see higher scores after getting a class of geniuses. Thirty-five years ago, a statistician, William S. Sanders, offered an answer to that puzzle. It relied, unexpectedly, on statistical methods that were developed to understand animal breeding patterns. Click here to read the article featured in The New York Times.
Next-Generation Science Tests Slowly Take Shape
Around the country, science instruction is changing—students are being asked to make models, analyze data, construct arguments, and design solutions in ways that far exceed schools’ previous goals. That means science testing, of course, needs to change as well. Yet considering federal requirements around science testing, and states’ logistical, technical, and financial limitations, putting a new, performance-heavy state science test in place is no easy task. Click here to read the article featured in Education Week.
Why Science Denial Isn’t Necessarily Ideological
Science is taking it from all sides these days. On the right are those who question the reality of climate change and doubt the theory of evolution. On the left are those who inveigh against vaccines and fear genetically modified foods. Those who do accept the authority of science watch helplessly as funding for research is threatened, all the while bemoaning the warping influence of political ideology on the beliefs of their compatriots. Into this sorry state of affairs arrive two new books, each of which draws on a different body of research to make the same surprising claim: that the misunderstanding and denial of science is not driven exclusively or even primarily by ideology. Rather, scientific ignorance stems from certain built-in features of the human mind — all of our minds. Click here to read the article featured in the Washington Post.
Assessment: Getting A Read On A Field In Flux
Students spend an average of 10 days out of the school year taking district-mandated tests and nine days taking state-required tests, according to the Center on Education Policy. Over 12 years of schooling, that adds up to nearly four months of a young person’s life. The estimate provides a starting point for wrapping one’s mind around the amount of testing students actually do in schools. While most of the teachers who responded to the center survey thought states and districts should cut back on the time students spend taking mandated tests, only a fraction of them wanted to dump those tests altogether. Click here to read the article featured in Education Week.
How Science Standards Went Mainstream Without Common Core’s Drama
Chad Colby, the vice president of strategic communications and outreach for Achieve, spoke with InsideSources about the processes that led to the creation of the NGSS, and how the groups involved were able to sidestep much of the political controversy that engulfed the Common Core. Colby, a former official at the U.S. Department of Education, is a proponent of the NGSS, which he said takes a more holistic view of the subject and encourages active exploration rather than passive memorization. Though the NGSS were created separately from Common Core, the standards are designed to link up together—should educators decide to take a cross-disciplinary approach to curricular development. Click here to read the article featured in InsideSources.
Stay tuned for next week’s top education news stories.
The Communication, Legislative & Public Affairs (CLPA) team strives to keep NSTA members, teachers, science education leaders, and the general public informed about NSTA programs, products, and services and key science education issues and legislation. In the association’s role as the national voice for science education, its CLPA team actively promotes NSTA’s positions on science education issues and communicates key NSTA messages to essential audiences.
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By Cindy Workosky
Posted on 2017-05-24
At the recent NSTA National Conference in Los Angeles, three-dimensional learning was, of course, a major topic of discussion. When those discussions focus on classroom instruction, though, the crosscutting concepts are often the forgotten dimension. Some educators argue that the crosscutting concepts should develop in students’ minds organically, and that it’s enough for a teacher to simply guide students to reflect on a learning experience to find connections to those concepts. Other educators see the value in making the crosscutting concepts more explicit for students, but they find it difficult to do so. We fell into this second camp.
We realized the crosscutting concepts are valuable tools for helping students develop, understand, and connect disciplinary core ideas and practices across learning experiences. However, we wondered how we could help students make these connections in effective ways. We started to see the answer to that question after reviewing the plant growth and gas exchange unit developed at Michigan State University (MSU). The matter and energy process tool used in that unit provides explicit scaffolding for students as they apply the Energy and Matter crosscutting concept to phenomena ranging from a drying sponge to a growing tree. This scaffold helps students see the structure of the crosscutting concept, and it forces them to connect general, abstract ideas about matter and energy with specific, concrete phenomena. Once we considered this tool, we envisioned ways to help students develop their ability to apply the crosscutting concepts when analyzing phenomena.
With this model in mind, we developed a series of graphic organizers (available as Google Slides) that scaffold each of the seven crosscutting concepts for middle and high school students. As we did this, we wanted to be sure to address the most important aspects of each concept. To accomplish this, we referred extensively to the explanations of each crosscutting concept in the Framework for K–12 Science Education (ch. 4, pp. 83–102) and to the grade- band progressions on the NGSS@NSTA Hub.
Crosscutting Concepts Progressions
For example, the overall description for Cause and Effect on the Hub states, “deciphering causal relationships, and the mechanisms by which they are mediated, is a major activity of science and engineering.” As a result, the mechanism linking the two events in a cause-effect relationship is a central feature of our Cause and Effect graphic organizer.
As you review the remaining graphic organizers, you will see that we adapted MSU’s Matter and Energy Process Tool only slightly. You’ll also notice eight graphic organizers, one more than the seven crosscutting concepts. We believe Scale, Proportion, and Quantity had two key aspects that could not both be represented in a single graphic organizer. The Scale organizer is actually inspired by another tool from the same MSU unit.
You will also see that each graphic organizer prompts students to apply the crosscutting concept to a specific phenomenon. We want students to think not in generalities, such as how the structure of cell organelles promotes the cell’s function, but rather in more specifically grounded ideas, such as why a person with a mitochondrial disease experiences chronic fatigue.
Finally, you’ll see considerable overlap across the graphic organizers, particularly regarding the role of evidence in supporting claims. This reinforces the idea that the crosscutting concepts are not isolated ideas, but interrelated lenses that scientists and engineers use to understand and analyze phenomena and problems.
What does this look like in the classroom? Teachers have used the graphic organizers in scenarios ranging from students analyzing the cause and mechanism of swarming locusts after reading an article about the phenomenon to using a modified version of the Matter and Energy graphic organizer to analyze changes in matter that occurred during a reaction in a bag activity.
One of our favorite uses is in a storyline we developed to investigate the causes of land and sea breezes at the beach. After viewing a video of a flag at the beach blowing in different directions during the day and night, students engage in a series of investigations to help them understand the factors contributing to this phenomenon.
Students then use the Cause and Effect graphic organizer to make sense of how these factors (differential heating of land and water, air pressure, convection, and so on) cause the flag to blow in different directions at different times. The key is that students are actively using the graphic organizer to help them comprehend the phenomenon. They are not simply taking notes about the phenomenon or about the general ideas of the crosscutting concept.
We encourage you to try out these graphic organizers, and we hope they will help you make the crosscutting concepts more explicit and more useful for your students. We hope your students will see the graphic organizers and the crosscutting concepts themselves as thinking tools that will help them make sense of the world around them and connect various phenomena and core ideas. As you use these resources with your students, we would love to hear about your experiences and welcome your feedback.
Jeremy Peacock
Jeremy Peacock, Ed.D., is Director of 6-12 Science at Northeast Georgia Regional Education Service Agency in Winterville, Georgia, and an NGSS@NSTA Curator. He is also a past President of the Georgia Science Teachers Association and a former environmental scientist and high school biology teacher. He is currently focused on supporting Georgia teachers in implementing their new state-developed three-dimensional science standards.
Amy Peacock
Amy Peacock, Ph.D., is the K-12 Science Content Coach in the Clarke County School District in Athens, Georgia, and the outgoing President of the Georgia Science Supervisors Association. She is a former food scientist and high school chemistry teacher. She provides professional learning, coaching, and support for science teachers in her district.
The mission of NSTA is to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.
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At the recent NSTA National Conference in Los Angeles, three-dimensional learning was, of course, a major topic of discussion. When those discussions focus on classroom instruction, though, the crosscutting concepts are often the forgotten dimension. Some educators argue that the crosscutting concepts should develop in students’ minds organically, and that it’s enough for a teacher to simply guide students to reflect on a learning experience to find connections to those concepts.
By Cindy Workosky
Posted on 2017-05-24
At the core of a Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) classroom is the sequence of exposing students to an interesting natural phenomenon, having students generate questions about the phenomenon, investigating student questions, then creating a scientific model to explain the phenomenon. Regardless of the practice defined in the performance expectation, this triad of phenomenon, questioning, and modeling should be incorporated into most NGSS lesson sequences.
One of the fifth-grade performance expectations (5-ESS1-1) is about supporting an argument concerning the apparent brightness of stars with respect to the stars’ distance from Earth. Before students can support an argument, they need to explore the nature of light and determine what happens to light as it travels through the universe. Students begin by viewing photographs of the night sky and generating questions. The following are examples of student-generated questions:
I post many of these questions on the wall, and we focus on certain groups of questions as we proceed through the sequence of lessons. We take the questions about differences in stars with respect to size and brightness and turn them into questions we can investigate. For these lessons, we decided on this question: How is the brightness of light affected by the distance from the source of light?
Student groups were given access to a darkened room and provided with flashlights, meter sticks, and black paper and white paper. They chose their own method to find an answer to the question.
After the investigation, they were asked to use pictures and words to document their results. In this case, they used the left side of the piece of paper and labeled the right side with “The Real World,” with the instruction that this would be completed later. This is an example of student work.
After student groups generated initial explanations of their results, we critiqued and revised them. This was a new skill for my fifth graders, so we conducted this process as a group. I projected images of the students’ work and asked them to decide on one suggestion that would improve the explanation and one suggestion they could use to improve their own explanation. The class discussion included the following:
The main part of discussion revolved around the “light beam” and what must be happening for the circle of light to get both bigger and dimmer. Students were given the opportunity to modify or supplement their diagram to incorporate additional information. The biggest change in most of the explanations was the addition of the light beam. Students discovered that it must spread out more as it moves away from the source. Many student groups returned to the flashlights to test and verify their ideas about how the light travelled as it left the source.
The next step was to have students transfer the results of their investigation. Students were supplied with flashlights and globes to determine how this happens in the real world. Students documented their understanding of the real world. Here are some examples:
After generating these real-world explanations, we came together again to examine images and brainstorm ideas for making them more accurate. The discussion focused on the question of whether the Sun is actually much bigger than other stars. Students realized that the Sun looks big because it is close, but it is actually not a big star.
As a final step in the process of understanding why closer stars look brighter, individual students were asked to share their final thoughts about this topic. Students showed varying levels of understanding about the topic, but most demonstrated they understood that the light from a distant object spreads out and therefore appears dimmer than the light from a closer source.
Kathy Gill
Kathy Gill is a science specialist at Willett Elementary School in Davis, California. She guides fourth- and fifth-grade students in exploring and explaining interesting scientific phenomena.
The mission of NSTA is to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.
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At the core of a Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) classroom is the sequence of exposing students to an interesting natural phenomenon, having students generate questions about the phenomenon, investigating student questions, then creating a scientific model to explain the phenomenon. Regardless of the practice defined in the performance expectation, this triad of phenomenon, questioning, and modeling should be incorporated into most NGSS lesson sequences.
By Cindy Workosky
Posted on 2017-05-24
Four years ago, I moved from teaching middle school science to teaching grades 2–5 STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics) labs. One of the biggest challenges I faced was limited lab time in our elementary school. Because we shared instructional time with social studies, I was only able to meet with students for two 40-minute periods a week for half the year.
I had many other challenges as well. I had to adjust my planning for younger students, and learn to work effectively with co-teachers whose main focus was English language arts (ELA) and mathematics. Elementary science had been taught from dog-eared textbooks that were older than the students we were teaching, and teachers had relied heavily on worksheets and recall assessments. I knew three-dimensional instruction—as promoted in A Framework for K–12 Science Education (Framework) and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)—presented a daunting paradigm shift for teachers, but I was confident the new standards would yield significant benefits for student engagement and learning.
I think that using the three dimensions helps me maximize student learning. I plan lab investigations, problem-based learning projects, and engineering design challenges to help students apply and extend their classroom learning as they engage in science and engineering practices to solve problems. Crosscutting concepts, in particular, provide an essential, highly useful schema for intentional three-dimensional planning because they offer a big-picture perspective that helps me plan instruction with recurring themes as students’ progress through elementary science. According to the Framework, “Explicit reference to the concepts, as well as their emergence in multiple disciplinary contexts, can help students develop a cumulative, coherent, and usable understanding of science and engineering.”
Crosscutting concepts make intuitive sense to my youngest students, especially the concept of structure and function. For example, my second-grade unit on interdependent relationships in ecosystems features a modeling project to address 2-LS2-2, “Develop a simple model that mimics the function of an animal in dispersing seeds or pollinating plants.” We begin by viewing a video of a dog running through a field, collecting burrs on its coat, then shaking them off. I ask students if they have ever walked through the woods or a field and found burrs stuck to their socks or shoes. I inquire, “How do you think the burr sticks to your socks?”
We examine seeds with hand lenses and a 3D microscope, and view online images of seeds with hooks and spikes. I then ask why students think a plant would produce seeds with hook and spike structures. (Note: Before this lab lesson, students had explored seed dispersal by wind and water, and had discussed the importance of seeds traveling away from their parent plant for greater access to resources like water, sunlight, and space for their roots to spread.)
Students observe that the hooks help the seed get carried to a new spot where it can have a better chance of growing, and I introduce the term function. Function is the structure’s job: how it works to help the plant. We also examine examples of seeds surrounded by fruit and discuss how fruit is a structure that functions to attract an animal, helping a seed get dispersed. Of course, this produces much hilarity in the room as students realize how the seed eventually gets deposited in a new location, accompanied by a useful helping of fertilizer.
Squirrel with cheek pouch structures that function to carry nuts
I introduce an engineering design challenge: “Use the engineering design process to design, construct, evaluate, and present a simple model that mimics the function of an animal in dispersing a plant’s seeds. Your model must show the animal and seed structures (parts) and show how they function (work) to make seed dispersal possible.”
Bird disperses berry seeds through a drinking straw digestive tube
Students explore structure and function in third grade as they design a desert plant with adaptations to absorb and store water during a flash flood and to prevent water loss that occurs through evaporation. Before designing their plant, teams test various materials for speed of water absorption and structural integrity when wet.
Students wrapped their plant’s above ground structures in waxed paper or plastic wrap to function to prevent evaporation.
Data dashboard
Our Primary School’s Data Dashboard is posted prominently on a cafeteria wall. Each grade is responsible for recording daily precipitation (grade 2), hours of daylight (grade 1), and high and low temperatures (kindergarten). Teachers bring their students to the cafeteria with clipboards to ask questions and look for patterns, a crosscutting concept. Opportunities abound for discussing additional crosscutting concepts at our Data Dashboard, such as cause and effect and stability and change.
Recently, I participated in a Twitter chat on crosscutting concepts #elngsschat, one of my favorite Twitter chats for sharing ideas for elementary science teaching. Participants are enthusiastic, passionate science educators, eager to share their ideas, successes, and failures. Elementary science teachers can use this chat and hashtag to build a supportive PLN—especially helpful if you teach in a small district with limited science specialist teaching staff. As we continue to progress in our NGSS implementation journey, I look forward to hearing other educators’ experiences with teaching crosscutting concepts at all grade levels.
Beth Topinka
Beth Topinka is the S.T.E.A.M. lab teacher for grades 2–5 at Millstone Township School District in central New Jersey. She’s a vocal advocate for interdisciplinary, problem-based learning, and loves to create and share engaging 3D investigations and engineering challenges. She is a Science Friday Educator Collaborator, and was recently named a Science Channel Science Superhero. Topinka was selected as a state finalist for the 2016 Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching.
The mission of NSTA is to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.
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Four years ago, I moved from teaching middle school science to teaching grades 2–5 STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics) labs. One of the biggest challenges I faced was limited lab time in our elementary school. Because we shared instructional time with social studies, I was only able to meet with students for two 40-minute periods a week for half the year.
By Mary Bigelow
Posted on 2017-05-23
Do you have any ideas for faculty meetings for a new science department chairperson? I’m sure I can handle most of the responsibilities, but I’m terrified of leading meetings. —S., Indiana
Facilitating a meeting is not unlike teaching a class, so apply your classroom management strategies to “meeting management.”
You could also use a “flipped classroom” strategy. For your meeting topic, send out readings or links to video segments to watch prior to the meeting. (The NSTA journals and web resources would be good sources.) Your meeting can focus on active discussion, decision-making, or teacher reflection related to these topics. Teachers can use the meeting time to work collaboratively on tasks that they would otherwise have to do on their own.
As a new chairperson, you may run into resistance from teachers who are used to the old ways. Participating in discussions or group activities may take some getting used to. If meetings previously were seen as a waste of time, you may have to be persistent to demonstrate that things are going to be better. And they will!
Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tomsaint/2987926396/
Do you have any ideas for faculty meetings for a new science department chairperson? I’m sure I can handle most of the responsibilities, but I’m terrified of leading meetings. —S., Indiana
Facilitating a meeting is not unlike teaching a class, so apply your classroom management strategies to “meeting management.”
By Peggy Ashbrook
Posted on 2017-05-20
Two-years-olds may be too young to remember the seasonal changes that happened in the last year but they are not too young to understand and talk about the natural changes that happen on a shorter time scale—the cycle of day and night. Looking for the Moon can be a nighttime or daytime activity. Older children remember events that occur seasonally—leaves dropping from deciduous trees or the occasionally heavy snow that closed school and made new play opportunities in their familiar landscape. All ages are affected by regional changes such as annual flooding, summertime dry spells, and changes in animal behavior. Hunting seasons are tied to annual animal lifecycles.
Migration of animals such as toads and bears are the focus of community efforts to make residents aware of the seasonal changes in animal activity. In some regions, all are fascinated and sometimes freaked out by the appearance of a large number of cicadas, an insect that has a life cycle that for some species takes more than a decade. Regional experts, such as naturalist Alonso Abugattas, can help us make sense of changes we don’t understand.
Those occasional events are memorable. Observation and documentation are strategies that help children (and scientists) make sense of the everyday and occasional changes in their environment (NGSS practices). Children can make simple documentation of the daily weather and relate it to the seasonal cycles that affect living organisms. If your children are recording the daily temperature in relative or standard measurement, they can look back and see how many days with “hot” temperatures occurred before their pea seeds sprouted, cicadas emerged, or the swimming pools opened.
Children who are not yet reading numerals or able to count the small marks on a thermometer can read the colors on a thermometer with color-coded groups of 10-20 degrees of temperature. They can hold a cloud chart against the sky to match cloud types or collect and measure precipitation. A class’ daily “weather report” of sunny/cloudy/rainy/windy/snowy becomes much more meaningful when their sky cover and temperature data from the year is displayed so children can see patterns and relate changes in weather to changes in the life cycles of the plants and animals in their neighborhood. Early childhood educators are discussing weather education in the NSTA Learning Center Early Childhood Forum, one place to learn how to extend children’s understanding of the relationship between daily weather and seasons, and how those changes affect living organisms.
Two-years-olds may be too young to remember the seasonal changes that happened in the last year but they are not too young to understand and talk about the natural changes that happen on a shorter time scale—the cycle of day and night.
By Kate Falk
Posted on 2017-05-19
This week in education news, 12 Texas students injured in outdoor science experiment involving fire; student misconceptions about the teaching profession, as well as a lack of discussion on the part of professors, contribute to the current shortage of STEM teachers; President Trump’s new budget proposal would boost school choice; and according to NCTQ’s new report only 16 teacher prep programs ranked as top tier.
12 Texas Preschoolers Hurt In Blast From Color-Changing Fire Experiment Gone Wrong
An outdoor science experiment involving fire at a Texas Presbyterian preschool went terribly wrong Tuesday, injuring 12 students — six of whom were transported to a hospital with burns. A group of preschoolers were gathered outside to watch a teacher change the color of fire using different chemicals. The teacher mixed boric acid with methanol and tried to light it on fire. Nothing happened, so the teacher added more alcohol and lit the mixture again. Then there was an explosion. Click here to read the article featured in the Washington Post.
Teachers Speak: What PD Actually Works?
Even with the best technology in the world, there is one key element that determines student success: a high-quality, highly-effective teacher. In fact, some research estimates that teachers can impact students’ lifetime earnings by 10 to 20 percent, which can increase the U.S. gross domestic product by tens of trillions of dollars. And professional development (PD) is critical in helping teachers as they continue to hone their skills and evolve as educators. But what kind of PD is most effective, and does the kind of PD that helps teachers best change as teachers become more experienced? Click here to read the article featured in eSchool News.
Best Time To Build A Love Of STEM? It’s After The School Day Ends, Research Says
After-school programs can help students develop an interest in science, technology, engineering or math. In a national survey last year, more than 78 percent of children said they’d had a positive experience with the STEM subject areas because of an after-school program, according to new research from the PEAR Institute at Harvard University, McLean Hospital and IMMAP: Institute for Measurement, Methodology, Analysis and Policy at Texas Tech University. The survey included 1,600 children and after-school program leaders in 11 states. Click here to read the article featured in The Hechinger Report.
We Need More STEM Teachers; Higher Ed. Can Help
America’s colleges and universities have fallen short for decades in providing K-12 schools with teachers, particularly secondary school teachers, in the high-need STEM fields of physics, chemistry, math, and computer science. These shortages continue to have an impact on the quality of STEM education with the ripple effect of discouraging young students from pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering, and math themselves. Click here to read the article featured in Education Week.
Trump Budget Proposal Would Boost School Choice
President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2018 spending proposal would ax the Department of Education budget by $9 billion while pouring an additional $1.4 billion into school choice programs. The blueprint offers the first concrete insight into the administration’s education policy priorities and would make good on the Trump team’s goals of shrinking the federal government and helping students in failing schools by allowing them to attend the school of their choice, public or private. Click here to read the article featured in U.S. News & World Report.
Classroom Gaming Should Be Engaging, Tied To Curriculum – And Not Require Teachers To Code
It’s one thing when master teachers successfully implement learning games in a carefully controlled research study. But engaging students through game-based learning (GBL) means little unless the games are easy to implement and effective where they matter most—in the classroom. For district leaders, teachers, and edgame developers, this involves an ongoing balancing act of engagement, pragmatic learning and in-class application. Click here to read the article featured in EdSurge.
New Science Standards Deliver Students From Textbooks To ‘Real-world Applications
A new wave of teaching science is taking shape at Kittatinny Regional High School and its sending districts, steering students away from learning about facts from a textbook and into learning real-world applications of science, complete with hands-on experiments and big-picture concepts. Adopted by the New Jersey Board of Education in 2014, the Next Generation Science Standards are state mandated for K-12, and according to the New Jersey Department of Education’s Science Coordinator Michael Heinz, the standards shift a student’s thought process to “how things happen, why things happen and how the world works. Click here to read the article featured in the New Jersey Herald.
Only 16 Teacher Prep Programs Ranked As ‘Top Tier’ In New Report
Lesser-known Hope College in Holland, MI; Lipscomb University in Nashville, TN; Messiah College in Grantham, PA; and St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN surface on a shortlist of the best undergraduate programs for preparing high school teachers, alongside Arizona State University, the University of Iowa and the University of Minnesota. What puts them there? According to the National Council on Teacher Quality, each has “solid admission standards, provide sufficient preparation in each candidate’s intended subject area and show them how best to teach that subject.” Many also do well in teaching future teachers how to manage a classroom and in providing high quality practice opportunities. Click here to read the article featured in Campus Technology.
Stay tuned for next week’s top education news stories.
The Communication, Legislative & Public Affairs (CLPA) team strives to keep NSTA members, teachers, science education leaders, and the general public informed about NSTA programs, products, and services and key science education issues and legislation. In the association’s role as the national voice for science education, its CLPA team actively promotes NSTA’s positions on science education issues and communicates key NSTA messages to essential audiences.
The mission of NSTA is to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.
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Legislative Update
By Jodi Peterson
Posted on 2017-05-19
President Trump’s budget is not expected out until Tuesday, May 23, but the Washington Post is reporting that the Administration is planning massive cuts to the U.S. Department of Education, and is proposing that another $1 billion be provided for school choice programs. (In related news, Secretary DeVos is expected to unveil the Administration’s school choice plan during a speech on Monday, May 22.)
As expected, the budget would also eliminate funding for Title IV-A, the ESSA block grant that would target funds to every state and district. The Washington Post states, “The Trump administration would dedicate no money to a fund for student support and academic enrichment that is meant to help schools pay for, among other things, mental-health services, anti-bullying initiatives, physical education, Advanced Placement courses and science and engineering instruction. Congress created the fund, which totals $400 million this fiscal year, by rolling together several smaller programs. Lawmakers authorized as much as $1.65 billion, but the administration’s budget for it in the next fiscal year is zero.”
This block grant was championed by Republicans during reauthorization of ESSA after they eliminated the Math and Science Partnership program and other smaller targeted grants. More about the programs the Administration plans to eliminate here and about Title IVA and STEM here.
The Administration’s skinny budget for FY2018, released earlier this spring, eliminates Title II professional development and class size reduction funds, and 21st Century Learning Programs (afterschool programs).
It is important to keep in mind that Congress is responsible for passing appropriations laws. As the Post article points out, “Asked for comment, a spokesman for Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Education Committee, referred to Alexander’s response in March to the release of Trump’s budget outline. That statement emphasized that while the president may suggest a budget, “under the Constitution, Congress passes appropriations bills.”
The FY2017 budget passed last month provides $400 million the ESSA Title IV, far less than the $1.65 billion that Congressional authorizers requested for the program. Since this is not enough funding for all districts to receive funding for FY2017 only states have the flexibility to distribute the funds to districts competitively rather than by formula. Learn more about Title IV during this webinar on May 24.
Stay tuned.
Business Invests in Professional Learning. Why Doesn’t Education?
An Education Week commentary written by ASCD Executive Director Deborah S. Delisle argues why cutting professional learning funds for teachers is shortsighted. Read it here.
House Committee Approves Career and Technical Ed Legislation
The Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act (H.R. 2353) updates federal CTE policies to help more students gain the knowledge and skills they need to compete for in-demand jobs. The proposal is largely identical to legislation the House of Representatives passed in September 2016.
Stay tuned, and watch for more updates in future issues of NSTA Express.
Jodi Peterson is the Assistant Executive Director of Communication, Legislative & Public Affairs for the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) and Chair of the STEM Education Coalition. Reach her via e-mail at jpeterson@nsta.org or via Twitter at @stemedadvocate.
The mission of NSTA is to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.
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President Trump’s budget is not expected out until Tuesday, May 23, but the Washington Post is reporting that the Administration is planning massive cuts to the U.S. Department of Education, and is proposing that another $1 billion be provided for school choice programs.
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