Going Big: Getting 1200 Teachers to Implement the Next Generation Science Standards

As I discussed earlier, my school system has 114 elementary schools.  That equates to roughly 400 teachers per grade level. That means in August, I have 1200 teachers who will begin teaching the NGSS for the first time.  How will I meet the professional development needs of the equivalent of an army regiment?

Let's start with the traditional face to face option.  On August 17th, I will hold a half day professional learning experience for all 1200.  There will be five centers, one in each geographic area.   At each center, a classroom teacher who piloted the curriculum this year will lead a professional development focused on practical implementation strategies they used during the year.  A session which will give them an opportunity to gain some hands-on experience from the perspective of a student.  This session will be preceded by a video based professional development which digs into the inner workings of the curriculum guides.

On top of that, my staff and I have been going into classrooms all year video recording the aforementioned pilot teachers implementing the lessons. These videos are embedded in the associated lessons as "need it right now" professional development.  We don't have them all, but many of them.

Lastly, is the curriculum itself.  Each guide and lesson is an opportunity to improve the pedagogical and content knowledge of teachers.  One thing I've learned this year as a result of writing curriculum and watching it being taught, is that the NGSS are confusing for the uninitiated.  Teachers need to understand the performance expectations in order to understand why they are teaching the curriculum we wrote.   As Steven Pruitt said in his top ten list , simply reading the NGSS does not mean you understand them.

To overcome this, my district has invested time in helping us understand the concepts of Learning Goals and Success Criteria.   I discussed Success Criteria in an earlier post.  Those are the much lauded "I can" statements.  As I've worked on understanding these in the context of the NGSS, I made a pretty significant upgrade to my lesson plan structure.

The table below is the outcome of several design iterations.  It starts with an engaging essential question followed by the PE.  The color coded section is an hommage to the NGSS.  On the left, are the learning goals.  This section comes directly from the three components of the PE.  These are what students are expected to understand.

This word "understand" is a difficult one.  How do we know students understand something?  This is where the Success Criteria come in.  These are directly from the evidence statements.  While these are three dimensional, they tend to learn toward one of the PE components more than another.

Below the colored section is the student friendly version.  The Success Criteria are the non-negotiables. The Success Criteria (aka "I can" statements) are a starting place.  They are specifically what students will do to demonstrate they understand the Success Criteria.  These are negotiable.  A teacher may decide that the lesson we wrote will not meet the needs of their student.  They can develop their own "I can" statements based on the needs of their students.

The example below comes from the grade 5 Earth Systems topic page.   As always,  I look forward to your comments and questions.    

Essential Question:  How is water distributed around the world?
Standard:  5-ESS2-2. Describe and graph the amounts and percentages of water and fresh water in various reservoirs to provide evidence about the distribution of water on Earth.
Learning Goals(s): (based on the components of the performance expectation) Students will know and be able to:	Success Criteria: (based on the evidence statements) Students can:
Describe and graph quantities such as area and volume to address scientific questions.	Students graph the given data (using standard units) about the amount of salt water and the amount of fresh water in each of the following reservoirs, as well as in all the reservoirs combined, to address a scientific question
Nearly all of Earth’s available water is in the ocean. Most fresh water is in glaciers or underground; only a tiny fraction is in streams, lakes, wetlands, and the atmosphere.	Students use the graphs of the relative amounts of total salt water and total fresh water in each of the reservoirs to describe that: The majority of water on Earth is found in the oceans. Most of the Earth’s fresh water is stored in glaciers or underground. A small fraction of fresh water is found in lakes, rivers, wetlands, and the atmosphere.
Standard units are used to measure and describe physical quantities such as weight and volume.	Measure quantities of water using metric units.
Student Friendly Learning Goal(s): I understand:	Student Friendly Success Criteria: I can:
the amount of water found in oceans, lakes, rivers, glaciers, groundwater and ice caps can be represented.	create a graph showing the relative percentages of each source of water on Earth.
most of the water on Earth is in the oceans freshwater is distributed unequally across the Earth	explain where freshwater can and cannot be found on Earth in relation to where people live.
liquids are measured in volume using liters as its unit.	measure quantities of water to represent each source of water on Earth if all water equaled 1000 ml.