The Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with A Lot of Templates- Part 1

Schools are closing which means curriculum development work is spooling up for the summer.  Next week begins the official transition of my curriculum to the NGSS.  I am excited and a little nervous.  I equate it to going on vacation.  You are excited to go, but worry constantly about what you forgot.  Fortunately,  my regiment of curriculum writers has been prepped to be flexible as we go.  I have a plan, but it will undoubtedly need alterations.  With that said, let me reveal my current plan.

As stated in a previous post I introduced you to my cracker jack transition team.  They constitute the vanguard of this development process.  Their mission is to take a topic page full of performance expectations (PE) and mold them into a performance based assessment scenario.  These scenarios must be locally based and culturally relevant.   The odd workflow, shown below, will serve as our plan of attack.

First, my thanks to Peter A'Hearn for his post in California Science.  His notion of storytellers verified the direction I wanted to go and provided the basis for my first template. The NGSS is a very different species of standard.  There is a critical need to really dig deep into the NGSS documents as well as the Framework which caused them.  I evolved Peter's template a little and tried my best to match the colors.

This is a very non-linear process.  The storyline and driving question will actually come last, sort of.  A table like the one shown above has been developed for each performance expectation on a topic page.  I had initially thought we might need to split some of the topic pages into multiple assessments, but the K-2 pages hang well together.   The one exception to this is the grade 1 page on Waves.  I find it difficult to talk about light as waves without bumping into the fact that light also acts like a particle.  I know if I don't do this, I will have one of the local physicists on me.   Don't laugh, I've had a Nobel Prize winner complain about my treatment of gravity at grade 2.     Despite this, we will use them as is.

A couple of things about the document.  First, the PE  is colorized based on the three dimensions.  I liked how the NGSS webpage highlights the PE by its parts and links them to the boxes.  Below this are the prior knowledge (What they should know) and the terminal knowledge (What they learn next). As generalist, I find many elementary classroom teachers do not see the big picture of science and how it develops.  It also emphasizes how the NGSS is developmental. .  Without a firm foundation in science and engineering, students can not catch up (e.g. science has to be taught as a performance based content.  Reading about science is not enough).

The colored table below that simply breaks out each dimension of the PE.  Note the highlighted word in the DCI box.  I am also keeping spatial connections front and center as we develop the curriculum (See the three part series on why spatial thinking is important).  The writer's job is to think divergently.  Come up with as many enduring understandings and driving questions as possible with the goal of pulling all three parts together.  As they do this, I am hoping their minds are whirling on possible ideas for the scenario.  Cue next template.

GRASPS originated from Understanding by Design as a Mad Libs for developing performance based assessments.   Similarly,  the Buck Institute for Education (BIE) has a variant called the Tubric.  Whichever one you use, the premise is to establish the parameters of the performance.

You will note that my workflow is non-linear.  It was not always so.  I initially had a checklist of steps, but each time I read it found myself rearranging steps.  It then dawned on me that my source of consternation came from that fact that these early steps would not be linear.  The premise for the scenario will evolve while the PEs are unpacked.  Likewise the driving questions would need to focus on applying knowledge in order to create a solution to unit the problem.

I will let you know in a week how this step goes, before going to much further down the workflow. 

Winning the Hearts and Minds

Wow!  I should have thought about sending this out to the NSTA community earlier.  Glad to have you on board.   I thought I would talk a little more about my NGSS transition team.  I made mention of them in my previous post.  The team is made up of 30 classroom teachers.  I made that a requirement for service.  Too often, specialists that are not living the day to day implementation of curriculum ultimately dictate what happens in the classroom.  I feel very strongly that that if a curriculum is going to be accepted by teachers, then teachers must be intimately involved in its creation.  I also made sure the teachers that help develop the curriculum are also there when we conduct the professional development.  I'm not in a classroom so I know I do not of a legitimate voice in front of teachers.

Besides being a classroom teacher, I also wanted representation from all areas of our county.  I have to make sure the curriculum speaks to all students and not just to the "Lake Wobegon" region.  This resulted in six teams of five.  One team for each grade level with a teacher from each of the five geographic regions.

The team has been meeting throughout the year and I am constantly amazed by their endurance.  We are dealing with some profound changes in how science will be taught.  Given that much of the change focuses on the "Practices", I opted to spend a lot of time on those (see image below).  I also wanted to make sure the team had a chance to think about how this curriculum would be reflected in our new Learning Management System (LMS).

Our first workshop was on "Argument Based on Evidence".  I was very fortunate to have Carla Zebal-Saul and her team from Penn State come down to work with us.  After reading her book "What's Your Evidence?", I know their CER (Claim-Evidence-Reasoning) framework was what I wanted for every student.  I will expound about this workshop later.

                                                          

The premise for the second workshop really focused on how do we make math a meaningful part of the science curriculum.  What came out of it was a focus on having students apply the math concepts they should be fluent in for a particular grade level according to Common Core.

I am very excited about the upcoming April workshop.  Spatial literacy is something you will hear me rant about if you keep reading this blog.  A lot of current research points to it being a missing link in developing a STEM ready workforce.  This is particularly true in underrepresented populations.

The goal of the June workshop will be to complete Stage 1 and 2 according to Understanding by Design. This means establishing an essential question, enduring understandings, and a performance based assessment  for each unit.  These blueprints will then be turned over to the curriculum development team in July to complete stage 3.

A Five Year Mission

Maryland has established a five year timeline for implementation of the NGSS (below).  In order to make that transition with all the other constraints on what the elementary science curriculum must be, I had to start in October 2013.

I can't speak to the secondary requirements.  I am only concerned with the preK-5 implications.  Notice I said "preK".  Yes, Maryland will have pre-Kindergarten science standards.  These have not been established.  The bottom line  is that I have to have at least six grades of curriculum ready by June 2017 in order to be ready for implementation in Fall 2017.  

How will I do it?  Well, I won't be doing it by myself.  I have assembled an amazing group of teachers to be my NGSS Transition Team. More about them later.  This team is meeting now to build the unit blueprints based on the Understanding by Design framework.  Their job is to build what I refer to as the bookends of a unit.  Once the performance expectations are established,  essential questions, and enduring understandings help frame the big ideas (Stage one).  They will also develop the initial performance based assessments that students will have to complete in order to demonstrate understanding (Stage two).  The rest of my timeline follows a very simple pattern.  

Once the NGSS team completes the blueprints, they hand it off to curriculum writers (which fortunately will be many of the team).  These writers will write the initial unit drafts (Stage Three).  Once these drafts are complete, my two resource teachers and I will add meat to the bones.  This will include the addition and creation of learning objects for our new digital curriculum system.  It will also mean the development and testing of the materials needed to implement the various hands-on experiments students will conduct.  That's right, I get to play with scientific materials in my job.  Envy me.  Once we are satisfied with the unit drafts, we train a small pilot group of teachers.  The goal is 10-15 schools scattered across our county.  These teachers implement the units and report back on what needs to be changed.  We make improvements and deploy to all schools the following year.  The year I am most fearful of is 2016.  I will be refining grades 3-5 and monitoring the pilot for grades K-2.  

So, what is your plan to bring the NGSS to the elementary classroom?