This week in education news, North Dakota’s superintendent is requesting teachers to review new academic standards; California teachers find new science standards fun, but expensive; four New York students injured in a chemistry experiment gone wrong; several Wisconsin school districts are trying a new method of evaluating what students learn; Veteran astronaut Dr. Bernard Harris named new CEO of NMSI; new Gallup poll reveals that superintendents have a hard time finding quality teachers; Houston-area administrators are using physical activities to better engage students in STEM courses; and Ohio high school students may soon be allowed to replace the Algebra 2 graduation requirement with an advanced computer science course.

Review Of New Academic Standards Begins

North Dakota’s superintendent is asking teachers statewide to review academic standards for science, health, early learning and the arts as the process for drafting new benchmarks gets underway. State Superintendent Kirsten Baesler is asking teachers who specialize in science, health, the arts or early learning to apply to serve on one of the four content committees that will draft standards. Read the article featured on WRAL.com.

Fizz! Pop! Bang! Teachers Find New Science Standards Fun, But Costly

With their emphasis on hands-on experiments, California’s new science standards have turned classrooms into noisy, messy laboratories. That’s been popular with students and teachers who say it’s a more effective way to learn science than studying textbooks and memorizing facts, but the cost of all those underwater robots and exploding chemicals has left some teachers wondering how they can successfully implement the standards with ever-restricting budgets. Read the article featured in Ed Source.

New Florida Law Expected To Increase Conflict Over Textbooks

In Florida, some say global warming and evolution are a hoax and should not be taught in textbooks unopposed. Others say their local school’s textbooks shortchange Islam’s role in the world, while their opponents argue it’s the danger posed by Muslim terrorists that’s underexposed. Under a bill passed by the Florida Legislature this year, any district resident — regardless of whether they have a child in school — can now challenge material as pornographic, biased, inaccurate or a violation of state law and get a hearing before an outside mediator. Read the article featured in the Tampa Bay Times.

Science Mishap Sends Bronx Students To The Hospital

A chemistry experiment gone awry sent four tenth graders from a Catholic school in the Bronx to the hospital after they were singed by a flame. Sister Patricia Wolf, president of the school, said that an experienced chemistry teacher was showing students a procedure that involved alcohol and a metal when the flame got out of control. Read the article featured in The New York Times.

By 2022, America Will Need 1 Million More College Grads With STEM Training Than We Are On Track To Produce

As our economy evolves, we must evolve with it, developing a workforce prepared to meet the demands of a new economy. Now is our chance to build a workforce ready to succeed over a lifetime, not just over the next three to five years. At the heart of the opportunities and risks we face in a new global economy is the increasing value of skills rooted in STEM. Indeed, 10 of the top 14 fastest-growing industries require STEM training. To keep up with the projected growth in demand for STEM jobs, America will need an additional 1 million more college graduates with STEM training by 2022 than we’re on track to produce. Read the article featured in The74million.org.

Some Wisconsin Schools Use Standards-Based Grading…What Is That?

Several Wisconsin school districts are trying a new method of evaluating what students learn. It’s called “standards-based grading,” and it’s different than the typical A-F grading system people may be used to. Advocates believe the new approach will replace the old system. But, in order for the practice to catch on, it will take a shift in mindset from both parents and educators. Read the article featured on WUWM.com.

National Math And Science Initiative Names Dr. Bernard A. Harris, Jr. As CEO

Veteran astronaut and STEM education advocate Dr. Bernard A. Harris, Jr. has been named the new chief executive officer of the National Math and Science Initiative. Dr. Harris is a founding member of the NMSI board and has served in that role for 10 years. He succeeds Matthew Randazzo, who recently was named president and CEO of The Dallas Foundation. Randazzo will assume this role in mid-2018 and will remain a NMSI board member. Read the press release posted on News9.com.

Superintendents Grapple With Finding Stellar Teachers

Concerns around finding highly-qualified teachers and principals plague today’s district superintendents, according to a new Gallup poll. Two-thirds of district superintendents in a new survey said the quantity of new teacher candidates is decreasing, and 43 percent said new principal candidates are decreasing. Read the article featured in eSchool News.

Report: STEM Degrees Rise, But Disparities Remain

Despite modest gains in degree attainment in science, technology, engineering and math, women and minorities remain grossly underrepresented in the fields, according to a new report. Women are also less likely to enter STEM occupations after earning a STEM degree as are blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans, according to the report, which was prepared by the RAND corporation and commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute. Read the article featured in U.S. News & World Report.

Schools Add Another ‘S’ To STEM—For Sports

Administrators from the Houston area discovered a more effective way of teaching terminal velocity and gravity—by keeping students afloat on 150-mph winds inside a vertical tunnel. The experience—hosted by the indoor skydiving facility iFLY—is one of many physical activities that schools use to better engage students in STEM courses. Read the article featured in District Administration.

ESSA Is A Big Piece Of The STEM Equity Puzzle

High-quality STEM education not only has the potential to foster curiosity and creativity in students, it is critical for U.S. economic growth. But both words and plans are insufficient without follow-through. To best promote student success in STEM, we need both adequate funding and implementation of smart and equitable policies by all states and the District of Columbia. Read the article featured in Education Week.

Can Computer Science Replace Algebra 2?

Should students be allowed to take computer science instead of Algebra 2? Ohio schools could be heading in that direction. House Bill 170 would let high school students replace the Algebra 2 graduation requirement with an advanced computer science course. Students could also choose to take computer science in place of some other science courses. Read the article featured in Education Week.

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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I’m teaching a science methods class. I’d like to know: What was the most important thing you learned in your undergrad science methods classes? What do you wish you had known about science teaching that you didn’t learn in undergrad?
– L., Illinois

This post to an NSTA e-mail list produced excellent responses and I wanted to share my thoughts.

Important things I learned in university:

• Reflect on everything you do, every class. Ask yourself: Did they get it? Is this working toward my goals? How can I tell they learned this? How could I have taught this differently?
• Check over and test everything you do in advance. Practice demonstrations and labs to uncover any issues, modify as needed, and resolve with safety concerns. Even labs that look “foolproof” on paper could take twice as long in the classroom. Check all handouts for errors and out-dated information.

Important things I learned in my classroom:

• You teach students, not science. Students want to know that a teacher cares about them. Flexibility, understanding and compassion are good traits.
• Resist being the “sage on the stage.” There is no way to know everything so admit when you don’t know something. Turn perplexing questions into learning experiences for the whole class, including you. Make sure that the students are active in their learning instead of passively listening to you.
• You do not have to create everything yourself. Use premade materials that fit perfectly; modify the materials that don’t; and create new materials when you can’t find anything that fits.

Hope this helps!

Photo Credit:  Harker School Staff Photographer (The Harker School)

Have you revisited the sessions from previous NSTA conference to check out the resources posted by presenters? Begin with the 2017 Elementary Extravaganza that has 27 resources listed, both documents and webpages. It was held on Friday, March 31 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. My table had a parade of adults and children whipping up bubble foam from simple ingredients, and talking about the properties of matter.  Other EE tables showcased:

• an engineering challenge to design and build shade structures to protect special UV-sensitive beaded lizards from the sun (Laura Kitagawa),  
• using a paper template and CD to make a spectroscope as used by the New Horizons spacecraft to explore Pluto (Nancy Tashima),  and
• infusing children’s scientific knowledge and understandings into writing poetry (Patricia Bricker, Melisssa Faetz, Nancy Luke, & Kelly Tracy).

Search for a topic, such as “notebook,” to locate sessions with specific topics. See Katie Morrison and Deb Chickadel’s resources from their “Using Lab Notebooks in the Preschool and Elementary Classroom” session for examples from preK-grade 5 and how-to guidance.

Even if you don’t teach high school you might look at materials from sessions such as “Blue Marble Matches” by Veronica Leija and Brandon Hargis to enhance your own understanding of science concepts. 

You can view sessions as far back as the 2015 Chicago National Conference by going to the NSTA conference page  and clicking on “Sessions” for the recent or future conferences.  As you search using a grade level or keyword to identify sessions of interest, keep an eye out for links to presenter materials listed at the bottom of the session information. 

Not all sessions have links to materials–consider attending the next NSTA conference near you to learn directly from the presenters!

Until recently, the world’s most popular K12 computer science website, hourofcode.com, did not have any physics-focused coding activities. This was the case until Professor Chris Orban of Ohio State University initiated an effort to develop coding tutorials for physics teachers to learn code. Below is a link to describe his work on this project:

https://physics.osu.edu/news/prof.-chris-orban-receives-aip-meggers-project-award

Perhaps the best way to understand what Professor Orban has developed is to look at the “The Physics of Video Games” Hour of Code video tutorial below:.

Another perspective is to examine the STEMcoding project (u.osu.edu/stemcoding), which was just released on hourofcode.com/learn. The direct link to the video tutorial is at go.osu.edu/hourofcode . The “Physics of Video Games” coding activities are intended for absolute beginner programmers in grades 9-12 and they were designed with significant feedback from high school physics teachers. All activities are 100% chromebook compatible. The STEMcoding project, which was recently selected for the AIP Meggers award, is led by Prof. Chris Orban from Ohio State University and Prof. Richelle Teeling-Smith from the University of Mt. Union.

Once you take the time to explore this project, I think you will find it very useful for high school teachers. Since we all know that video games are of interest for most high school learners, having teachers examine how physics can be understood within video games offers educators great potential to motivate students to learn physics. In summary, this is a winner!

For more information including (mostly online) summer professional development for teachers (from any STEM discipline) please contact Prof. Chris Orban at orban@physics.osu.edu

Edwin P. Christmann is a professor and chairman of the secondary education department and graduate coordinator of the mathematics and science teaching program at Slippery Rock University in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania.

How can your science department become a site for developing teachers’ professional learning?

Building the Science Department: Stories of Success by Wayne Melville, Doug Jones, and Todd Campbell, features authentic accounts of teachers invested in reforming science teaching and learning. From the authors of the NSTA Press guide Reimagining the Science Department, this book offers stories told in teachers’ own words to provide advice and insight into strategies for building and improving a science department.

The book was conceived with the intention of sharing the stories of teachers who had negotiated reforms, challenged their own teaching practices, changed their classrooms, and transformed their departments.

The first part of the book focuses on scientific activity as represented in A Framework for K–12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), and looks at how scientific activity can be used to “frame the work within science departments and how it aligns with contemporary visions of science teaching and learning.”

The second part of the book features teacher vignettes that address the various parts of a professional learning framework: context, content, activities, and processes. Each vignette is accompanied by commentary that unpacks key points and messages, and includes questions designed to challenge teachers to improve their instructional practices and align these practices more closely with current reform initiatives. As the authors note, one teacher alone cannot achieve the vision and aim of the Framework and NGSS; instead, teachers must work together as a department to collaborate, learn together, and move the department forward as a unit.

The book discusses some of the cultural issues that serve to maintain the status quo in science teaching. “The current reality is that school science has not changed much in the past century and is struggling to engage and retain students in many parts of the Western world,” the authors state.

Traditionally-taught school science, rather than engage young people, turns them away from the field; therefore, in order to reform science education, deeper and more authentic professional learning will be required. What’s being offered to teachers now isn’t good enough. “If we are being honest, the value of much professional learning that occurs in schools can be questioned. The reason for this pessimistic view is that much professional learning fails to address teachers’ learning needs, the context of their work, or the ways in which adults learn,” the authors state.

By exploring real-life examples from both new and veteran teachers, Building the Science Department can help science teachers identify gaps in their knowledge and experience, and start to build departments that will be able to meet the needs of diverse teachers interested in creating curricula and teaching practices that will engage their students and help them to achieve.

To learn more, read the sample chapter “The Content of Professional Learning.”

This book is also available as an e-book.

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I would like to include a rubric when students are completing various labs and activities in science. Could you share any examples?
– A., Iowa

I have found that checklists, in particular, are good assessment tools during a lab. The objective is to quickly assess and record student performance while still monitoring the lab as you circulate the room and answer questions.

Most textbooks and lab manuals include generic checklists and rubrics for assessing lab skills and maintaining safety. Streamline the checklist by incorporating it with a class list. I would often copy checklists on colored paper and carry it around on a clipboard. You can align it with curricular goals by listing the specific learning outcomes. A ‘checklist’ doesn’t have to be tick-boxes – it could be a Likert-type scale or a quick numbering system (as simple as 1-2-3). Incorporate space for comments.

A quick search of NSTA’s The Learning Center came up with a few sample chapters that might be useful:

• The Nature of Science and Science Inquiry https://goo.gl/mnEf5T
• Assessment in Science: Practical Experiences and Education Research https://goo.gl/M6R9eb

4Teachers (https://goo.gl/3QHVUa) offers a pretty good checklist generator with some built-in items that you can select, edit, and augment. (After you select the appropriate grade level under the Science heading, check out the option for Experimental Research.) I would even give students the checklists to self-assess after cleanup.

This same website also has an excellent rubric maker: rubistar.4teachers.org. This website revolutionized the way I teach because I could generate an assessment rubric for almost any type of activity I could think of: reports, posters, brochures, public service announcements, videos, and more. I would never have considered doing debates in biology if it weren’t for this website. As for your specific needs: under the Science heading there is a Lab Report item that contains some lab safety assessment options. Group work rubrics can be generated as well.

Hope this helps!

“Discovery bottles” are one way to allow children to use small objects without putting them in their mouths. These bottles for open-ended exploration can be constructed to relate to many different science concepts and topics. Other bottles are made expressly for helping children calm themselves as needed. See the Early Years blog post of September 17, 2009 or Sandy Watson’s 2008 article, “Discovery Bottles,” about using bottles filled with different materials as tools for science explorations. (Watson, Sandy. 2008. Discovery Bottles. Science and Children. 45(9): 20-24) Of course there is only “discovery” when children are first playing with the bottles and later when they talk about what they observe and think about it. None of the Discovery Bottles I’ve made have ever held children’s interest for more than a few months. Pass them on to another classroom or child care provider when your children have finished their discoveries.

Child care providers at a professional development session showed how important open exploration also is for adults. I was presenting about using Discovery Bottles to engage infants to eight year olds. I shared examples of using bottles filled with water and objects to play with and roll, and to observe water flow, air bubbles, magnification, color change (looking through colored water), floating and sinking objects, counting the number of objects, identifying shapes of objects, and for soothing oneself. Then each participant made their own to use for a purpose they chose and later described.

One provider and his spouse made a bottle half filled with water and just one cube made from thick art foam. He intended it to be a way to explore the level of a surface, to see how the cube floated when the bottle was laid sideways on different surfaces. Unexpectedly the cube stuck to the side of the bottle when he rotated the bottle, rather than staying afloat in the water. He wondered why the cube stuck there, wondering if static electricity was involved.

We talked with the small group at the table, then rubbed the bottle on our hair and tested to see if another cube of art foam would stick to the outside of the bottle. It did not. We talked about how the inside was different from the outside of the bottle and they identified water as being present inside. So he wet the outside of the bottle with water and put a cube onto the wet outside. Since the cube stuck in the water on the outside of the bottle he said he thought it was something about the water that made the cube stick to the bottle. We talked about how water sticks to our hands when we wash them and that children also experience this. There is a word for that phenomenon, “adhesion.” Knowing a word doesn’t help us understand why a phenomenon happens, but it does give us a quick way to talk about it. The ‘why’ can come much later, after children have had many experiences observing the properties of different states of matter and building structures out of many smaller parts, when children encounter the fact that matter is composed of atoms and molecules in middle school.

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) offer teachers the opportunity to consider teaching science in a new way. We help students engage with, wonder about, and make sense of natural phenomena, which closely resembles how scientists perceive the world and do their work. By observing phenomena, scientists generate questions, predict outcomes, and generalize results to develop shared knowledge. Using NGSS, and with the teacher’s help, students also work to build shared knowledge.

But the NGSS present another opportunity that is nested within shared knowledge-building: the opportunity to teach sensemaking. Because shared knowledge-building is a collaborative effort, it requires students to interact with one another and make sense of one another’s ideas. To productively engage with other students’ ideas for understanding phenomena, students must do three things: Make their own idea clear and comprehensible, understand their classmates’ ideas, and figure out how to compare their ideas.

These tasks are harder than they seem; even adults find them challenging! When a colleague processes a shared experience very differently than you do, consider how hard it can be to regard his or her viewpoint as equally credible as your own.

Our understanding of what others say is heavily influenced by both our expectations and prior knowledge. When students have ideas that are very different from what is expected and what is already known, teachers must provide support so the ideas can be comprehended and considered potentially valid and sensible. Collective sensemaking is particularly challenging for ideas contributed by English language learners (ELLs), or by students with social or cultural perspectives that diverge from the rest of the classroom community. Their ideas may be differently constructed or developed from resources unfamiliar to students accustomed to mainstream white middle-class norms promoted in the classroom. In these situations, teacher supports require more thoughtful and purposeful preparation.

I recommend three processes to help prepare for these sensemaking opportunities:

1. Send home a science content or phenomenon interview for family
2. Use Equitable Discourse Tools
3. Prepare to Dig Into Discourse

Using these processes leads us along a new trajectory for developing increasingly sophisticated sensemaking skills: 1) Seeing others’ very different perspectives as valid, 2) learning how to make use of others’ ideas, and 3) developing sustained and rich discourse stamina.

Send home a science content or phenomenon interview for family (translated if necessary)

As the teacher in the ELL case study in Appendix D of the NGSS, I included the homework assignment to interview a family member about the driving question of the unit, “Is all soil the same?” As an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher, I have found these family interviews useful in revealing the high-level thinking that students use but are unable to express in English. They also provide access to the intellectual resources for sensemaking that ELLs will draw from and offer to the rest of the classroom community.

Ever since Luis Moll and colleagues generated the Funds of Knowledge concept to describe the intellectual resources students bring to school from home and community, content-area ESL teachers have been developing ways to access those resources. If a scientific phenomenon is accessible and occurs in daily life, students can engage in high-level discourse with their families in their home language and then share those resources in science class.  

The opportunity and benefits are not just for individual ELL student; they extend to all students in the classroom. When the teacher shares the interviews and ensures they are viewed as valid, the entire class gains access to increasingly diverse resources. In science, however, it can be challenging to ensure these resources from home and community are considered relevant by other students. My solution has been to write the experiences, ideas, and stories shared from home on sentence strips and present them as “evidence.” As a group, we can condense the stories into sentences, and highlight them alongside other evidence we’ve collected in class.

Returning to the example from Appendix D of NGSS, students shared information gathered from their family interviews about soils in different countries. Combined with other sources of evidence, this rich collection from diverse students helped our classroom community understand that soil varies across countries, has different colors and textures, and is made of different materials, and these factors influence what types of plants will grow.

Use Equitable Discourse Tools

As a content-area ESL teacher, I used the talk moves (traditional discourse moves) from TERC’s Talk Science Primer. But I found myself checking off different Talk Moves without using all the ideas to the fullest extent. This unintentionally introduced bias and led students to believe that some ideas were more useful for the community than others. Unfortunately, it was often the same students whose ideas were implied to be “less useful.” For example, if a student was presenting an idea that was unclear or didn’t make sense to me, I tended to emphasize it less because my perspective of success in discourse was based on whether I had satisfactorily delivered the prompt (e.g., Can someone build on that idea?), rather than on the idea’s usefulness to the community. There wasn’t an expectation that all ideas would be useful, but rather that all ideas would elicit a response.

What discourse moves—or what I propose we call Equitable Discourse—do is highlight the potential usefulness of every student idea. The concept of usefulness is an affordance. Each discourse move, in this framework, is a description of the work needed to capitalize on the affordance of a student’s idea. Talk can help clarify, strengthen reasoning, or apply “old” ideas to the new one. Every idea offers affordances for improving the sensemaking underway. By carefully considering how to use every idea, we advance sensemaking, and we begin to grasp how others perceive those science concepts, and how to shape and communicate those perspectives for a deeper and broader understanding of the phenomenon by everyone in the classroom.

Returning to the NGSS Appendix D example, an ELL student shared with the class the idea that black soil might mean that the soil has more water in it. His idea was not clearly understood, and it did not seem to particularly interest the rest of the class. The teachers, of course, thought that it deserved a response, and said, “Ah, yes, very interesting! Who agrees with Mohammad?” But initially, we did not substantially mine the idea.

The student persisted. He was trying to share that wetness could be an important identifiable characteristic of soil. If we had used the barometer of “idea successfully used by the class” as the measure of well-executed discourse, he would not have had to struggle to express himself. I consider this an excellent example of how equitable discourse moves can support class sensemaking, and enrich the knowledge building overall.

One of the equitable discourse moves is to “help student clarify their idea.” Mohammad’s idea—that soil can be wet and that wetness should be noted—didn’t make sense to most of the students because they were used to thinking of “wet vs. dry” as being a temporary characteristic, rather than a characteristic that varies across different types of soil. The discourse move helps us consider “whether or not the idea has been sufficiently clarified for use.” In this process, teachers model for the students the wherewithal and perseverance necessary for clarification, and at the same time, make explicit the skill of self-reflection for “how do I know that the idea is now clear?”

Examining and clarifying the student’s idea, especially because the idea didn’t make sense at first, turned out to be a valuable experience. At the end of the hour, the students remarked that soil as a characteristic of a habitat can be described in terms of wetness, and that this impacts what organisms the soil can support.

Prepare to Dig Into Discourse

Funds of Knowledge resources and the discourse moves are intended to support the teacher in creating an equitable space for conversation or “discourse.” This moves us away from the IRE model, in which —the teacher asks a question, the student answers, and the teacher evaluates——an approach perhaps best termed “guess what the teacher thinks.” We are aiming instead for a rich conversation in which teachers model the scientific practice of sensemaking: Ideas are being offered, considered valuable, evaluated, and then built on or discarded.

I have found that rich discourse happens when we allow sufficient time for thinking and reasoning to occur by and among many students. Most importantly, student ideas should represent a variety of ways to approach the phenomenon, incorporating the diverse intellectual resources that students bring from home and community, as well as classroom-based experiences. By digging deep into a conversation around questions with more than one right answer, students’ ideas can carry the conversation.

We are told that our aim with the NGSS is to mirror in the classroom many of the processes and practices that scientists use. But we can enhance some of those real-world practices by employing the processes I’ve described, and by viewing the classroom community and individual students as moving along a sensemaking trajectory in a way that is purposefully supported. Because the scientific community is extremely stratified and not very diverse, and current science may not be representative of broader and more diverse communities, we could be overlooking key questions and missing out on ideas that would foster deeper understanding and innovative solutions for the challenges science undertakes. By enabling our students—our future scientists and decision-makers—to acknowledge, evaluate, and incorporate diverse perspectives, we have an opportunity to build a world that expands and enriches who does science, how science is conducted, and how it is used in the real world.

Emily Miller

Emily Miller is an elementary teacher and was a lead writer for the NGSS Diversity and Equity Writing team. She has taught science as an ESL/Bilingual Resource science specialist at a Title I urban school for 16 years. Miller has used the NGSS in her own diverse classroom and continues to improve and refine teaching to the standards with her students. She is consulting with the Wisconsin Center for Educational Research to develop teacher tools to promote sensemaking and language learning for ELLs in science. E-mail her at emilycatherine329@gmail.com.

Additional Links

Discourse Moves

MacDonald, R.,  E. Miller, and S. Lord. 2017. Doing and Talking Science: Engaging ELs in the Discourse of the Science and Engineering Practices. In Science Teacher Preparation in Content-Based Second Language Acquisition. p. 179-197. Springer International Publishing.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-43516-9_10 

https://www.wida.us/get.aspx?id=2095

http://stem4els.wceruw.org/resources/Student-and-Teacher-moves.pdf

Funds of Knowledge 

Moll, L. C., C. Amanti, D. Neff, and N. Gonzalez. 1992. Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory into practice. 31(2), 132-141.

https://edsource.org/wp-content/uploads/old/Luis_Moll_Hidden_Family_Resources.pdf

Appendix D

https://www.nextgenscience.org/appendix-d-case-studies

Lee, O., E. C. Miller, and R. Januszyk. 2014. Next generation science standards: All standards, all students. Journal of Science Teacher Education. 25(2), 223-233.

ELL Case Study ELL

https://www.nextgenscience.org/sites/default/files/%284%29%20Case%20Study%20ELL%206-14-13.pdf

Different perspective STEM TEACHING TOOL

http://stemteachingtools.org/assets/landscapes/STEM-Teaching-Tool-47-Attending-to-Multiple-Perspectives.pdf

TERC MOVES

https://inquiryproject.terc.edu/shared/pd/TalkScience_Primer.pdf

This article was featured in the November 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 access other articles from the November issue on assessing three-dimensional learning. Click here to sign up to receive the Navigator every month.

Visit NSTA’s NGSS@NSTA Hub for hundreds of vetted classroom resources, professional learning opportunities, publications, ebooks and more; connect with your teacher colleagues on the NGSS listservs (members can sign up here); and join us for discussions around NGSS at an upcoming conference.

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

Future NSTA Conferences

2017 Fall Conferences

• New Orleans: Nov. 30–Dec. 2, 2017

National Conference

• Atlanta: March 15–18, 2018

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