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.