Do It Yourselves NGSS Planning Guide: Resources for Building an NGSS Aligned Curriculum

In an earlier post, I reviewed an excellent free resource from the National Research Council that addressed the implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards and surveyed some of the stumbling blocks to a seamless and effective transition from earlier standards and curricula to the new curricula, largely teacher developed, that the NGSS requires. The Guide to Implementing the Next Generation Science Standards was released on January 8, 2015. (It’s free here.)

But we’re two years past the publication of that still helpful guide, and there are now many additional resources available for you and your colleagues to tap as you develop your curriculum maps, units, lessons, and activities in alignment with the NGSS.

A Team of Teachers Assembled to Work on NGSS Aligned Curriculum

So where to begin?

Top Go-To Sites

First I’d like to point you in the direction of several “top go-to sites” for anyone planning NGSS aligned lessons. There are three sites that I highly recommend as starting points for your work, sites where content is vetted and reliable. NSTA, the National Science Teachers Association, has been developing NGSS aligned resources and guidelines, and Next Generation Science, the parent organization for the NGSS, has a wealth of resources for you to use free of charge, including guidelines for and examples of model course maps. You’ll find lots of helpful resources at both of the first two sites. The third, Bozeman Science, offers a series of videos, one for each of the fifty-nine NGSS standards, provides a good overview review of the science by grade level bands in short, easily digested programs, each under 15 minutes. Once you know your content topics (the disciplinary core ideas), the crosscutting concepts and the science and engineering practices you want to focus on, watching these video can help jumpstart the actually planning by serving as a content refresher and by getting everyone on the planning team on the same page. Paul Anderson, the Bozeman, Montana, high school teacher who created this series, is a hero of mine, for providing, free of charge, such a helpful and reliable resource for his fellow teachers across the country.

For Your Resource Collection:

Laura Chomiak, our Golden Apple STEM Institute Program Coordinator, recommends two additional sites your team might find helpful. They are the Teaching Channel and STEM Teaching Tools.

Laura also recommends signing up for the monthly newsletter NGSS Now, which focuses on a different standard and phenomenon each month with how to incorporate them into your own classroom. Each month they also respond to a teacher’s question about NGSS implementation. You can sign up here.

Specific Guidelines for Getting the Job Done:

Next, I’d like to suggest several useful documents from the National Science Teachers Association to help with organizing the work itself. They describe how to organize a team  in planning an NGSS curriculum and how to design units and lessons aligned with the NGSS.

Key Concepts in NGSS Planning:

There are also some key strategies that have emerged since the release of the NGSS to help organize your thinking about the standards, so that you can efficiently and effectively implement them in ways that are genuinely engaging to students. Here are three of the top concepts, which, along with using a “backward design model” focused on the NGSS Performance Expectations, can help you and your team create exemplary units.

Golden Apple STEM Institute’s “Backward Design” Lesson Plan Template

Bundling:

• What is bundling? “Bundles” are groups of standards arranged together to create the endpoints for units of instruction. Bundling is just one step in a curriculum development process; many other steps are required to create instructional materials designed for the NGSS.
• Why bundle? Bundling is a helpful step in implementing standards because it helps students see connections between concepts and can foster more efficient use of instructional time.

For a webinar and other resources, including example bundles, check here.

Phenomena:

• What are phenomena? “Phenomena” are things that happen in the world, things that we seek to understand. A phenomenon becomes the starting point for building the science knowledge that helps us figure it out. There is a strong recommendation, consistent with the NGSS, that teachers should start their units with phenomena, not with science content knowledge or vocabulary. Let curiosity about the phenomenon drive student learning.
• Qualities of a good phenomenon:
  o A puzzling observable event or process that
  o Generates student interest and questions and
  o Intersects with numerous PEs (Performance Expectations) which
  o Can be explored through science and engineering practices

There are some great example phenomena that can jumpstart your planning and a helpful short (3 min.) video on phenomena based instruction.

Storylines:

• What are storylines? Storylines are statements that describe the context and rationale for the Performance Expectations (PEs) in each grade band and section. “A storyline is a coherent sequence of lessons, in which each step is driven by students’ questions that arise from their interactions with phenomena. A student’s goal should always be to explain a phenomenon or solve a problem. At each step, students make progress on the classroom’s questions through science and engineering practices, to figure out a piece of a science idea. Each piece they figure out adds to the developing explanation, model, or designed solution. Each step may also generate questions that lead to the next step in the storyline. Together, what students figure out helps explain the unit’s phenomena or solve the problems they have identified. A storyline provides a coherent path toward building disciplinary core idea and crosscutting concepts, piece by piece, anchored in students’ own questions.”  (Next Generation Storylines)

Example storylines are increasingly available online and by grade level, and you can find even find a PowerPoint on the topic of storylines to use with your team. Think of every unit as telling a story … perhaps a mystery to be solved by the clever detective work of your students.

Storylining is a Team Effort. Here Jason Crean Leads a Group of Teachers in Developing an NGSS Aligned Unit on Albinism.

Bundling, phenomena, and storylines all work together in creating engaging, coherent STEM units. When done well, they comprise a seamless whole.

Finally, I want to share some of the timeline/tasks you might find helpful as you organize your planning process, along with  some of the elements that should be in place to help you develop a successful end product.

Timeline/Tasks:
1. Identify who will be on the planning team – 3-5 teachers per band (primary, early elementary, middle/upper elementary).
2. Create a timeline for the work and be generous.
3. Devote a period of time, for the group and individual team members, to becoming familiar with the task/process and with the NGSS, identifying a target unit for each team to develop. Review some of the resources listed above individually or as a team before beginning to work on your own plans.
4. Study together one or two existing plans to become familiar with what a successful unit looks like, which elements are included by the planners. You can find these on the “top go-to” sites.
5. Begin the actually planning work by identifying 1-2 target performance expectations, then backward design the unit so that students have the learning experiences necessary to successfully accomplish the learning expectations.
6. Finalize the unit plan and teach it.
7. Evaluate and tweak the plan for the following year and to inform the next plan. What worked? What didn’t?

Todd Katz Developing a Student Activity for the Albinism Unit

Necessary Elements
• Adequate time: Find time for teachers to work together. Allot enough time to do a good job on the first plan, e.g., begin work in the spring; allow some summer planning time; execute the following school year.
• Passion for the work: Assemble a team that genuinely wants to do the work (get the right people on the bus). Pick teaching colleagues who are curious and who are willing to take some initiative, working with the team as well as independently outside of the designated team meetings.
• Incentives and recognition: Find a way to reward the team for making the commitment. Publish the results of their work so that other teachers can benefit, and we can all learn from each other. And always have food on hand.
• Patience: Be very patient with the people, yourself and your team, and the process. This will take time. It is deeply intellectual work.

It’s clear from all of these concepts and the accompanying resources that we’ve entered a brand new age in science instruction. There is no more covering the content chapter by chapter in a linear fashion as in days of old. Instead teachers are called upon to be creative in designing instructional roadmaps for their students to construct their own understanding of the world around them. And central to that new role is the importance of team work.

Happy planning!

~ Penny

You can learn more about Golden Apple STEM Institute here.

TGISF … Happy Science Friday!

Earlier this year I reviewed The War on Science by Shaun Otto. While the author spends most of the book recounting how corporations, making common cause with religious groups and supported by a corporate media that has come to believe that being “fair and balanced” means giving equal weight to the settled science on such issues as anthropomorphic climate change and patently false opinions, Otto also reserves some of the blame for the public’s distance from science to the scientists themselves. Scientists, he contends, have not done a very good job of communicating with the public, both about the nature of their work and about their findings.

Enter Science Friday, as one means by which that dynamic is changing.

On this last Friday of 2016 and just in case you haven’t stumbled on it yet, it seems particularly appropriate to spotlight this great resource for teachers, students, and the general public, and a vehicle by which scientists can share their work beyond academia. Science Friday airs every Friday on National Public Radio (NPR) from 2 P.M. – 4 P.M. Eastern Time, and you can also subscribe to podcasts or go to their website to listen to previous shows.

Science Friday, which boasts 1.7 million public radio listeners per week, celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2016. For 25 years, Ira Flatow and the Science Friday staff “have been devoted to helping people understand the world around them, and to making learning fun for everyone.”

In 1991, Ira Flatow, a young journalist whose initial forays into science reporting were stories about the first Earth Day in 1970, brought the idea for Science Friday to NPR as “a weekly conversation with researchers who discuss their discoveries in depth.” The show broke new ground as the first talk show dedicated solely to science. Now, as then, Flatow interviews scientists, mathematicians, inventors, technology innovators, and other researchers, “giving them the time they need to explain their discoveries and inventions. Over the years, Ira has spoken with some of the most celebrated thinkers and doers in the world of science, including Carl Sagan, Jane Goodall, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Sylvia Earle, Oliver Sacks, Richard Leakey, and many more.”

Ira Flatow, host of NPR’s Science Friday, discusses communicating science in his keynote address for the 50th Anniversary of NIH Environmental Health Research, November 1, 2016.

Flattow has written three books that popularize topics in science and technology: Rainbows, Curveballs, and Other Wonders of the Natural World Explained, They All Laughed… From Light Bulbs to Lasers: The Fascinating Stories Behind the Great Inventions That Have Changed Our Lives, and Present at the Future: From Evolution to Nanotechnology, Candid and Controversial Conversations on Science and Nature.

For a taste of Science Friday programming, give this conversation a listen — “How Much Math Should Everyone Know? (Show Your Work.)

I also love their science year in review and their science books of the year recommendations.

More recently, Science Friday has expanded to include opportunities and resources for participation and education. You can, for example, take a virtual field trip to explore the Columns of the Giants in California, complete with opportunities to collect evidence and apply your geological skills to other sites around the world.

And educators are offered free STEM activities and resources developed by the Science Friday Educator Collaborative, a group of six creative and highly accomplished teachers from around the country. “Starting in the spring of 2016, educators in the collaborative worked with one another and with Science Friday’s staff to create ready-to-use educational resources, all of which were inspired by the work of scientists and engineers featured in Science Friday media. The result is a collection of challenging and fun STEM resources for a variety of educational settings. And like all of the resources we share at Science Friday, they’re totally free and don’t require expensive materials to implement, so use as many as you’d like, and share them with your colleagues and friends.

Here are some of the ideas that these talented teachers developed:

• Backpacking into the Columns of the Giants to create an immersive virtual field trip;
• Drenching Colocasia plants to demonstrate hydrophobicity in nature;
• Painting watercolors to bring climate change data to life;
• Planting thermometers in a school parking lot to gather data on the urban heat island effect;
• Building kites to visualize and demonstrate Newton’s Second Law; and,
• Creating scale models of mud cores to simulate a timeline of tropical cyclones and hurricanes.

As you will see, each activity is unique. But they’re all designed to develop students’ critical thinking skills and encourage scientific exploration.”

Applications are now open, due Sunday, January 8, 2017, by 11:59 p.m. EST, for the 2017 Science Friday Educator Collaborative. You can learn more about that opportunity here.

Educators, you can sign up here to receive a monthly newsletter with free experiments and lesson ideas.

You might also be interested in the Science Friday weekly newsletter. It will let you stay up to date on all the fascinating science topics they’ll be covering on the program. You can sign up here to receive it.

In addition to being fascinating to listen to each week, Science Friday offers wonderful opportunities to build your science content knowledge in a fun way. They say, “We make science an ‘action’ verb.” But what I find particularly impressive is the fact that children as young as six can become addicted to the show. A mom recently tweeted “@scifri podcast is amazing. My 6 yo has binge listened to 4 hours of it. He loves it.” Why not introduce your students to Science Friday? Who knows, it just might inspire them to consider a STEM career. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

~ Penny

You can learn more about Golden Apple STEM Institute here.

The Care and Feeding of Science Fair Judges: It’s in the details …

Organizing a science fair is no small undertaking, particularly given the many demands on a teacher’s time. I like blogging about science fairs in the hope that sharing good practices across schools can help all of us create a better experience for students without having to reinvent the wheel school by school. What one school/teacher does well may not have occurred to another school/teacher to do. Perhaps you’ll find something helpful in the ideas below that you can incorporate in your own science fair planning.

Earlier this month I served as a science fair judge at Emiliano Zapata Academy in Chicago. Zapata’s science fair team did a great job of reaching out in advance, sending an email to prospective judges over a month before the event.

“It’s that time of year again! We need your help in attaining Science Fair judges. The Science Fair will be on Tuesday, December 6, 2016 from 8:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. We will be providing our judges with breakfast and a lunch that will not disappoint. Attached is a letter for the judges. Please feel free to forward this email to someone who might be interested in judging. College students are welcomed.

Thank you in advance.”

Attached to the email was a more formal letter. The letter reassured us that “everything you need to know will be easily explained to you during breakfast before you hear student presentations.”

Formal Invitation Letter to Judge the Zapata Science Fair

To help insure that all judges showed up, the organizers also sent several reminders during the lead up to December 6.

That morning, judges convened in the library, where breakfast was indeed served. Over coffee and pastries, we were given a presentation about the learning needs and styles of the adolescent children whose projects we would be judging, a primer on the science processes (scientific method) that the students were using in developing their projects, and a review of the rubric we would be using to judge. And, more importantly, we were provided with a list of questions we were encouraged to engage students in answering to reflect on their work. The students of Eliza Ramirez, 8th grade science teacher, had developed the questions with her, based on previous science fair experiences and the questions that judges had asked them that helped them think more deeply about their work.

Tuesday, December 6th, 2016
Emiliano Zapata Academy Gym

This is a list of questions for visitors to ask participants. If there are other questions you want to ask, please do! Our participants are ready to share about their research and experiment.

Questions:
What is your project about?
Why did you choose this project?
Where did you get the materials for your experiment?
How much time did each part of the process take you?
Who helped you with your experiment? How did they help?
What part of this project made you feel like a scientist?
What was a fun part of doing this project?
What was the hardest part of doing this project? What was the easiest part?
How did the project add to your knowledge of science?
What did you learn from this project?
How did your research influence your experiment?
Was there anything that went wrong in your project? How did you adjust or fix the problem?
What ideas for other projects can you get from this one?
If you were to do this project again, what would you change? Why?
How did you prepare to present?

Zapata put on a well-organized Science Fair. Students had been working on projects since the first month of school, and that showed in the quality of their work. All students had papers, and judges had the opportunity to read the papers in advance of hearing the students present. And the breakfast and lunch definitely did not disappoint.

Eliza Ramirez, Zapata Science Teacher and Co-Organizer of the Science Fair

These are my takeaways from my experience at Zapata:

The adults at Zapata honored their students and supported their success by being thoughtful in their own planning and organization. They took the enterprise seriously enough to not make a last minute affair of it, an all too common occurrence. They took the time to reach out well in advance of the Science Fair to secure judges, and they set aside time and created a presentation expressly for the judges to make sure that we too approached the task in a thoughtful and prepared manner. No surprise, Zapata is designated a Level 1+ school by CPS. It’s in the details …

And here is something to consider: If the experience is a good one for judges, they are more likely to agree to come back in subsequent years, making it easier for you to secure experienced judges in the future.

Kudos to teacher-organizers Carmen Reyes and Eliza Ramirez and to principal Ruth Garcia for organizing and hosting an exemplary Science Fair. And kudos to their students for doing a great job on their projects!

If asked, I will definitely be back next year.

~ Penny

You can learn more about STEM Institute here.

Performance Expectations: The Key to Your NGSS Planning

Earlier this month, President Obama spoke to students at Benjamin Banneker Academic High School in Washington, D.C. It was a broad and encouraging talk, lauding the school for its 100% graduation rate, praising teachers for their dedication to their students’ learning, encouraging the students to go on to college, and recounting his administration’s accomplishments in education.

But it was also a cautionary tale. The President warned his student audience, “We live in a global economy. And when you graduate, you’re no longer going to be competing just with somebody here in D.C. for a great job. You’re competing with somebody on the other side of the world, in China or in India, because jobs can go wherever they want because of the Internet and because of technology. And the best jobs are going to go to the people who are the best educated — whether in India or China, or anywhere in the world.”

We once led the world in education, the President told them, but unfortunately other countries have caught up to us.

“It used to be that a high school job might be enough because you could go into a factory or even go into an office and just do some repetitive work, and if you were willing to work hard you could make a decent living. But the problem is repetitive work now is done by machines. And that’s just going to be more and more true. So in order for you to succeed in the marketplace, you’ve got to be able to think creatively; you’ve got to be able to work with a team; you’ve got to be able to work with a machine and figure out how to make it tailored for the specific requirements of your business and your job. All those things require some more sophisticated thinking than just sitting there and just doing the same thing over and over again. And that’s why you’ve got to have more than just a high school education.

In a nutshell, the President was encouraging the Banneker students to be creative, to learn how to work with a team, and to solve engineering problems, all things that require sophisticated thinking, all things that the Next Generation Science Standards promote and expect.

But the NGSS can be a daunting document, and many teachers are unpacking it on their own.

Where to begin?

I’d like to suggest that you begin with the Performance Expectations for your grade level band and the particular Disciplinary Core Strand of Life Science, Earth and Space Science, Physical Science, or Engineering, whichever your unit of instruction will focus on. A Performance Expectation, as defined by NGSS, is nothing other than “a set of expectations for what students should be able to do by the end of instruction (years or grade-bands). So, the performance expectations set the learning goals for students, but do not describe how students get there.” There are anywhere from two to five performance expectations for each grade level/disciplinary core idea band. Getting students there is the creative part of your work as an instructional designer, i.e. teacher. And, incidentally, this is exactly the approach that Finnish teachers take in their own planning. It requires essentially using a backward design process (you can find an example at the bottom of the page) originating in the goals, or performance expectations, those things we hope students will know and be able to do.

So let’s access those Disciplinary Core Strands here:

A Good Starting Point for Your NGSS Aligned Units

When you click on the Disciplinary Core Strand and grade level your unit will focus on, you are taken directly to the performance expectations for that grade and strand and find, not only the performance expectations, but suggestions for how to understand it … the different forms a model can take, for example … and vetted suggestions for how you can get your students to successfully achieve those performance expectations through hands-on inquiry-based activities.

Easy to access and free to use guide to Performance Expectations from NSTA.

Far too often, the textbooks teachers are working with are outdated and are not NGSS aligned. They contain way too much content for any given year. NGSS emphasizes the principle that “less is more,” so you have to significantly streamline to keep to the spirit of the NGSS. As one teacher I spoke with recently noted, “The textbook is no longer the curriculum.” Further, in most of these texts there is no story line threading the Science and Engineering Practices, the Crosscutting Concepts, and the Disciplinary Core Ideas into a comprehensive and engaging whole. So we have to cut ourselves free from those traditional but outdated maps, reserving them to supplement our own planning, and more independently chart a course for our students through these new waters.

And then, if you find that throughway, you get to see these beautiful results of your work in the rapt faces of your young scientists.

Ms. Soto’s 2nd Grade Students Planned and Conducted an Investigation

This blog post is dedicated to two passionate and wonderful teachers with whom I’ve recently had the pleasure and privilege to work, Lisa Vaughn, 5th grade teacher at Pershing Elementary in Chicago, and Maria Soto, 2nd grade teacher at George Washington Elementary, also in Chicago. Thank you both for your inspriration.

~Penny

You can learn more about Golden Apple STEM Institute here. We are currently seeking partner schools in the Chicagoland area for our 2017 cohort.

Further Confessions of a Science Fair Judge (and a Very Cool Resource)

It’s that season again. Many teachers, anticipating science fairs later in the year, are beginning to think about making their science fair assignments.

If you’ve been following this blog at all, you probably know that I am not a big fan of science fairs as they often play out. One reason for my antipathy is the fact that I often find myself discussing a science fair project with a student who doesn’t have any real personal connection to the work. Invariably, the student has found the project on the Internet and it seemed quick and easy to do. The problem for me in that is that without real engagement, a specific personal connection, the whole process seems more likely to turn a student away from science than generating any long lasting enthusiasm for doing science. Based on those experiences, I’ve tended to dismiss the Internet as a resource for students to use in developing a science fair project, leaning more toward having students build on scientific investigations they’ve done with their teacher but exploring a new variable or investigating something about which they’ve become curious through personal experience.

But ideas should be revisited in the light of new evidence. And students sometimes do need help in coming up with an interesting topic.

Enter Science Buddies’ Topic Selection Wizard. And with that, I’m confessing I was wrong about Internet generated science fair topics.

The Wizard begins by asking 3 questions with pull down menus. How much time do you have for this project? What grade are you in? Did your teacher assign you a specific area for your project? I responded as a 5th grader, said I had a month to do my project and that I could pick my own topic, rather than a teacher assigned one in physical science, or life science, or engineering/invention, for example.

I then answered 26 question about my own interests with either Yes, Sometimes, or No, and 3 demographic questions. I didn’t make up these interests, by the way. When I hit the Make Recommendations button, I was presented with 459 project ideas matched to my preferences.

A  fun questionnaire directs students to projects that reflect their own interests.

Here’s the thing: As I read the recommendations, I could feel my heart race (yes, I’m a geek) because they sounded genuinely interesting to me! Paw Preference in Pets: I have three at home I could test right now, and I really wonder about what I would discover. Are Merlin, Cacie, and Elvis right or left pawed, and what, if anything, does that mean in terms of other aspects of their personalities? Movie Music: I’m a lifelong movie buff and have bought my share of movie soundtracks, beginning, when I was a teenager, with the lush Max Steiner score for Gone with the Wind. Pedigree Analysis: A Family Tree of Traits: I joined Ancestry.com a couple of months ago to see where the Wilsons came from, not to mention the Tkachs. I never thought to look at photographs to check ear lobes to find if our tend to be connected or not. But the first project idea I opened was Testing Ant Repellents because, guess what?, I just went into the kitchen for a hot cup of coffee and noticed that the ants were back, after I thought the coffee grounds I had tucked around had worked to drive them away, garlic to their relentless, aggravating vampiric march.

Another thing I love about this tool is what happens when you open up a topic that has captured your interest. There is so much there to draw on.

The tool provides a summary, which includes an abstract and a citation of the project in either MLA or APA style. The “Background” tab includes a bibliography and terms. There are also tabs for “Materials” and “Procedure,” which includes a sample data table. “Help” connects you to “Ask an Expert,” along with related links, and “Learn More” suggests science careers you might like if this type of project appeals to you. My favorite tab is “Make It Your Own,” which offers ways to adapt the project or extend it.

Science Buddies’ Topic Selection Wizard solves one problem I find with science fairs — that they fail to engage students in ways that are genuinely relevant to the student. They are also really good science, and the “Background” page does an excellent job of teaching important concepts. You could get lost for days exploring this site and learn a great deal of science in the process.

But I do have a caveat. While I think the Wizard is a good starting point for students new to science fairs, students who may not have found their science investigation chops quite yet, Science Buddies’ thoroughness in providing all the parts of the typical science fair project requirements, even down to the proper MLA or APA citations, could lead to it becoming a crutch and to outright plagiarism, the student simply copying the abstract, for example, if the teacher is not on top of the assignment and aware of the tool.

I think we would want students to use the Wizard suggested projects as models that they would eventually grow beyond, once they’ve had the positive experience of investigating something in which they are genuinely interested. Then they could simply apply the model to their own topics. Also, as teachers, we would want to facilitate and guide their experience with the Wizard, using it as a means to have substantive conversations with students about the topics that fascinate them. This borders on personalized learning. Used appropriately, Science Buddies Topic Selection Wizard is a great resource and if it’s new to you, it’s definitely one you should explore so that you can decide whether or not or how to share it with your students. Guaranteed, you will have fewer of the same project, fewer formulaic projects, and, mercifully, no more testing of paper towel absorbency. And those will be blessings indeed, at least to this science fair judge.

Which Paper Towel is Best? Do you really care?

A big thanks to Mary Bianchi-Chlada, one of our amazing STEM Institute coaches, for calling my attention to this great resource.

~Penny

You can learn more about STEM Institute here.

A New Tool for Teachers and Principals from STEM Institute

If you are looking for clear evidence that a classroom, including your own, is on its way to becoming inquiry-based, NGSS aligned, and just plain supportive of students developing their science and engineering skills, ask yourself these questions

• Are the students seen as scientists and engineers by themselves and by adults?

Sending a Clear Message That Students are Engineers (Kozminski Elementary Community Academy, Chicago)

• Are the students gathering, organizing, and analyzing data and in other ways experiencing the NGSS Science and Engineering Practices (SEP)?

NGSS Science and Engineering Practices — Are Students Doing These Things?

• Is the science instruction inquiry-based and hands-on rather than textbook based? (You know, the old memorize the vocabulary, read the book out loud, and answer the questions at the end of the chapter?) How often are students engaged in hands-on, minds-on work? (This should be frequent, not once or twice a month.)
• Are the students keeping science journals/notebooks, recording their observations, doing scientific drawings or designing solutions to engineering challenges, and reflecting on their observations and experiences, and is this a consistent practice? (For example, “Three months into the school year, when I look at their science notebooks, do I see pages and pages of recorded experiences of the children doing science rather than simply content notes, vocabulary, or pasted in worksheets?”)
• Are the students using the Wheel of Inquiry to develop investigable questions? Are they asking, “How does ________ effect ________?”

Student Developed Wheels of Inquiry (Stephen Taylor, Crowne Community Academy, Chicago)

• Are there photos in the classroom of students doing science? Are students’ scientific drawings posted? Are their engineering solutions on display? In other words, is there a visible documentary record that these are valued activities and engaging to students and that the students are doing hands-on, inquiry-based science/engineering on a regular basis?

At Tonti Elementary in Chicago, Photos of Students Doing Science are Nested Among those of Adult Scientists, Answering the Question “Who Is A Scientist?”

• Is the science/STEM question-driven? Is there a central question being explored through the activity? (This might be called the framing question, essential question, or focus question.) Are there more high-order questions (Bloom’s Taxonomy) being asked? Are students asking high-order questions too? Is there appropriate wait time so that all students have the opportunity to reflect and respond? Is the classroom management conducive to the questioning process and to students conducting scientific investigations or responding to engineering challenges?
• Are the lessons based on the 5 E approach? Are they Engaging the students in an intriguing observation or question, giving the students ample time to Explore the materials up front before proceeding to have them conduct an investigation and Explain what they observe? Are students given opportunities to Extend their investigation (possibly by using the Wheel of Inquiry and reflecting in their science notebooks) and Evaluate their results and understanding?
• Are the students excited when they hear they are going to be doing an investigation? Do they know what to do and immediately spring into action? Do they clearly understand the process and procedures because they are doing science and engineering on a frequent, preferably daily, basis? How much ownership do you see students taking for their own learning? Are students framing questions? Are students suggesting other possible investigations? Can students discuss their learning or communicate their understanding in a variety of ways?

Tonti Elementary Students Learn about the Properties of Water by Building Pencil Rafts … Hands On and Engaged!

• Was the lesson or unit constructed using backward design? Is there evidence of a clear instructional goal, an assessment, and something to hook the interest of students … rather than simply an activity? Are the NGSS and CCSS clearly identified and tied to the lesson or activity in a meaningful way and with multiple standards addressed? Are the subjects integrated in such a way that more science and engineering can be done because language arts and math support them and vice versa?
• Are students generally working in groups with clearly defined roles for each student in the group? Is it clear that the students know what to do, the protocols and procedures, when it’s time to conduct an investigation or meet an engineering challenge? Are materials managed in a timely and efficient way?

Using an inquiry-based, constructivist approach takes time because it’s a new way of teaching for many teachers. Seeing four or five of these success indicators in a classroom is a good sign. With enough time and encouragement, teachers are likely to build out their repertoire of inquiry-based activities and lessons into entire units of study and to increase student ownership of learning. Getting to that point is a multi-year process even for highly talented, committed, and experienced teachers. So be prepared to give it time and patience. Working with colleagues as a team to develop a lesson or unit can help speed the process along. To assist you along the way, our Partners in Inquiry website includes many activities from our summer institutes and school year follow-up sessions that teachers are free to use, activities that are already aligned with the above principles.

To make it even easier to gauge whether or not the principles STEM Institute promotes are present in a classroom, we’ve developed an infographic that can serve as a reminder of the things we think you should see.

Our New Infographic Reminder of What to Look for in a Great STEM Classroom

I hope it proves useful to you. I’d love to hear from you if you do use it or have suggestions to make it better.

Have a great start to your new school year!

~Penny

You can learn more about Golden Apple’s STEM Institute here.

Dumpster Diving for Science (and Engineering)

Summer is a great time for teachers to plan for the coming school year and gather materials for all the great learning experiences you are developing for your students. In the spirit of “Recycle, Re-use, Re-purpose,” and in recognition of the difficult financial straits so many schools find themselves in, I’d like to propose “Dumpster Diving for Science.”

Our intrepid STEM Institute faculty has made an art form of it, all in the name of giving their students richer learning experiences and the teachers in their professional development sessions some creative solutions for those limited budgets they face.

Jim Effinger with the Dumpster Box that Started It All — We Needed a Box Large Enough to Hold Wayne Wittenberg

To inspire your own participation in this soon to be Olympic sport, somewhat akin in a twisted sort of way to Pokemon Go, here are a few of our faculty’s favorite memories, their most fabulous finds.

Wayne Wittenberg said of the dumpster dive strategy for equipping his science armamentarium, “that’s how I got my first science equipment. My district just got rid of a whole bunch of science equipment and I grabbed it. That was 30 years ago, and I still use the equipment. Magnets, aquariums, and electric circuit boards, all of it was there. Districts have stopped doing this because it’s taxpayers’ money. But when a school transitions from one program to another, you can still snag some pretty good things.”

Howie Templer told me, “I’ve never gone dumpster diving except at my school when people throw random stuff away at the beginning of the year, but on days when people throw things out in their alleys in my community, I pick up things I can use in my classroom. You can’t ever look for something specific, but you can find things you can use. My best find was a tent. It’s the only thing I used intact. Everything else I used for parts in building stuff. Ice keeper stuff, for example, like foam, foam floaters, cardboard, bubble wrap. The tent was a discarded IKEA pop-up tent that I challenged my students to find the volume of. Then my students used the poles as a framework for building a structure they had to engineer to be freestanding. It was an architectural design problem. I’m always just looking. One of the most useful typical finds is the plastic storage containers people put things in to dispose of. I dump the contents and use the containers to organize and store my science supplies. Cardboard bankers boxes for paper storage are also easy to find in the alley.”

John Lewis said, “It’s pretty much my life. It’s pretty amazing how someone else’s garbage can be a treasure for your classroom. I find some stuff around schools — mine in particular. Anything from projector cart parts to an old overhead projector, last century’s technology. When the school throws it away one day, I retrieve it the next. The overhead projector, for example, is perfect for the color mixing activity I do, and Jim Effinger uses it to project the results of the hand washing experiment, the bacterial grown in the petri dishes. You wouldn’t want to buy something like that for one or two activities, but finding an old overhead in the dumpster is great!”

John Lewis with Salvaged Overhead Projector for Color Mixing Activity

Referring to the related sport of alley picking, John commented, “An annoying thing taking up space in someone’s garage could be the perfect illustration of the scientific principle you’ll be teaching next week. Just cruising down the alley, I’ve found hot wheels cars, furniture, and other cast offs that have found a perfect place in my classroom and curriculum.”

And he concluded, “Many of our giveaways at STEM Institute workshops have come from others’ castoffs, which can be used to enrich classroom experiences and supplement scarce resources.”

Not everyone feels comfortable dumpster diving. While Ron Hale has never done it personally, some of his best friends are dumpster divers. Ron has a teacher friend who looks for old electronics he can deconstruct for STEM activities. Ron is a bit averse to the sport himself.

Elizabeth Copper uses dumpsters in a unique way. Noticing that dumpsters tend to attract flies, she captures maggots in collection jars and flies out of a flytrap for forensic etymology. Students get to see the life cycle of flies and understand the life death continuum. Elizabeth advises, “Just like universal precaution, always carry your gloves with you.” She’s hoping this year to get Ron Hale to help her collect.

Bill Grosser’s first experience with the sport started after working at Amoco Chemical Corporation. He recounted, “They had a room there that was full of no longer used custom made research lab equipment. Some of it was bizarre looking, and you had no idea what it was designed to be used for, however it was obvious it related to science. When I started teaching my Amoco friends at one point called me up and said ‘If you want any of this junk, come over and get it.’ Lee Merrik, another Golden Apple Fellow, and I took our vans and we came away with two vans full of equipment and materials. 25 years later I still have a lot of it and use it for class. When it’s on the counter and the kids come into the room, they know that something spectacular is going to happen.”

Bill’s advice: “Always be on the lookout for cool looking stuff that will spark the inquisitive nature in kids.”

Jim Effinger and Bill Grosser often snag excellent finds together. By far best thing they ever got out of a dumpster was a full-sized cow from the old farm exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry. They couldn’t resist the temptation to whisk it away from the MSI dumpster because they saw the potential for humor. With Wayne Wittenberg’s help, they had to cut the legs down to get it into the van, and they drove down Lake Shore Drive with the cow clearly visible in the window. They put in in the research prairie where the students would be collecting bugs. It was worth all the trouble when the kids came running back shouting “there’s a cow in the prairie!”

Dumpster Divers Extraordinaire: Wayne Wittenberg, Bill Grosser, Jim Effinger, Louise Huffman.

 

Bill Grosser and Wayne Wittenberg Load Van with Rescued Cow

And that reminds me of what Jim Effinger always advises us on the first day of Introduction to Inquiry — “Have fun.” Some of those dumpster, alley, thrift store, garage sale, basement, or attic finds have great potential for humor. Certainly their primary purpose is to spark curiosity. They can make excellent hooks. And some can contribute to your students’ scientific investigations and engineering projects. But they can also contribute to making learning fun for you and your students.

To the dumpsters everyone!

~ Penny

You can learn more about Golden Apple STEM Institute here.

Quick Read: How We’ll Live on Mars by Stephen L. Petranek

“Studying whether there’s life on Mars or studying how the universe began, there’s something magical about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. That’s something that is almost part of being human, and I’m certain that will continue.” Sally Ride

“You need to live in a dome initially, but over time you could terraform Mars to look like Earth and eventually walk around outside without anything on… So it’s a fixer-upper of a planet. I would like to die on Mars, just not on impact.” Elon Musk

Following on the heels of the immensely popular film The Martian, our STEM Institute faculty is currently in planning mode for a new adventure — launching a STEM program at Illinois State University for a cohort of young Golden Apple Scholars, the teacher preparation arm of Golden Apple. The theme for the week of activities is “Mission to Mars,” and once the Scholars have experienced and reflected on the Mars mission-themed activities for themselves, they will be rolling out two summer camps for students in the area, one focused on students in 3rd through 5th grades and the other for students in 6th through 8th grade.

We are encouraging those students to apply by asking them to imagine themselves as part of the team of scientists and engineers that will launch the first successful manned mission to Mars in 2026. We tell them

“At the Mission to Mars ISU STEM camp, you will explore ways to get to Mars, land on Mars, live on Mars, study Mars, and return safely to earth.

During the camp you will get to…
• Launch rockets.
• Create a means to successfully land humans on Mars.
• Explore the planet, testing and analyzing the rocks, soil and atmosphere.
• Develop ways to grow food on Mars.
• Search for evidence of water on the Martian surface.
• Construct a settlement for you and your fellow space pioneers.
• Develop a way to safely return to and land on planet earth.

At the Mission to Mars ISU STEM camp, you will do all of these things so that you are ready to play a historic role in Man’s first visit to the mysterious red planet we call Mars.”

Imagine yourself as a 5th through 8th grader. Wouldn’t the prospect of participating in a Mission to Mars summer camp thrill you?

If you want to consider creating a similar experience for your own students, I have a quick read for you.

How We’ll Live on Mars by Stephen L. Petranek is a 2015 TED Original publication. Weighing in at 77 succinct, information-packed pages, including 22 gorgeous color photographs of the surface of Mars, the rocketry, and the exploration devices we’ve used to explore it thus far, it’s a little gem of a book for launching your own planning for a unit about getting to and living on Mars. Petranek begins with a brief history of the idea of man traveling to and colonizing Mars, acquaints the reader with the private space race currently going on involving, among others, Elon Musk, the creator of the Tesla car, details the challenges rockets pose for engineers, and analyzes the economics of a mission to Mars, before delving into the prospect of actually living on the red planet. What will we do about water? How will we breathe? How will we feed ourselves? What clothing and shelter can we devise to protect ourselves in such a hostile environment?

Clearly we will have to change something if we are to view Mars as a long-term habitation for human beings. Chapter 7 “Making Mars into Earth’s Image” goes into various ways humanity might set about terraforming Mars to create a suitable home for humans. Also called planetary engineering or planetary ecosynthesis, terraforming was initially proposed by Carl Sagan in the journal Science in 1961. Students can learn a lot of science exploring the various scenarios scientists and engineers have proposed. But what if rather than changing Mars to be more like earth, we changed ourselves to be better able to survive on Mars? Petranek explores this intriguing possibility that could be achieved via gene manipulation.

Chapter 8 explores the ubiquitous WIIFM question or “What’s in it for me?” What’s in it for humanity to invest in establishing human settlements on Mars? The most obvious answer is that Mars could serve as Plan B for a species that has ruined its own home planet, providing an escape hatch should earth become less and less habitable. At least some of humanity would survive. But as it turns out, there’s a veritable fortune to be made in colonizing Mars and exploiting the natural resources contained in the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter, which is much easier to access from Mars than it is from Earth.

On Our Way!

The final chapter returns to a historical perspective, comparing the exploration and settlement of Mars to the most obvious analogy from Western history, that great period of exploration which opened the New World to European explorers and settlers. What an intriguing opportunity to connect social studies and science in any Mission to Mars unit you would design.

As our work on the Mission to Mars curriculum evolves, we’ll be sharing it on our Partners in Inquiry website. In the meantime, this quick read should set your own thinking in motion toward developing a Mission to Mars unit for the students you teach.

And here’s something for you to dream on and to spark your students’ imaginations and creativity. A NASA scientist recently announced that we could transport humans to Mars in a month. A month! And be sure to check out the images and videos of Mars that NASA has made available, paid for by our tax dollars and worth every penny!

Until next time …

~ Penny

You can learn more about Golden Apple STEM Institute here.

Golden Apple STEM Institute TED Playlist: 10 Inspiring Talks for Inquiry-Based STEM Teachers

If you’re a follower of TED talks you are probably already familiar with TED playlists, TED or curator created groupings of TED talks around a particular theme. You know the power of these collections to spark your thinking about a  topic. If you aren’t familiar with TED, the following short videos will provide you with an introduction to these inspiring and entertaining talks on the cutting edge of human understanding.

By the way, TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, but the talks are much more wide-ranging that those three words suggest, delving into science, mathematics, education, and numerous other fields. The talks themselves are given at an annual TED conference. This year’s TED conference was in Vancouver and just just concluded. Attending the conference is by application and invitation and costs $8,500, not including airfare, lodging and food. In the coming weeks, the talks from that conference will be posted online and are free. Cities around the world have created their own TED conferences called TEDex, and those talks are posted on the TED site as well.

STEM Institute has assembled the following ten TED talks that capture the spirit of inquiry, curiosity, and fun that are at the heart of our program. They suggest what we hope students will experience in their STEM classes.

 

Why we need the explorers

This talk could be subtitled “on the importance of curiosity driven science.”

 

Three rules to spark learning

A high school chemistry teacher shares insights he learned from his surgeon that changed how he practices the craft of teaching.

 

Hey science teachers – make it fun

Why textbook driven instruction isn’t the way to go — be playful and use storytelling to awaken your students’ interest.

 

Science is for everyone, kids included

This talk is on the importance of play; science as a way of being; children’s questioning; and experiments as play.

 

Math class needs a makeover

Although this talk is about high school math, the takeaways apply equally to elementary math and science – the importance to students of formulating the problems; here’s some great teaching advice to lead students to patient problem solving.

 

Hands-on science with squishy circuits

Make some homemade play dough for little kids to build circuits.

 

Kids can teach themselves

Sugata Mitra explores how you can indeed feel confident in turning over more responsibility for learning to kids themselves.

 

How I harnessed the wind

Inspiring talk by a young man from Malawi that could lead students to explore the maker movement, engineering, and the power of young people to make real world contributions; a good hook for a unit on energy or for Earth Day.

 

Biomimicry’s surprising lessons from nature’s engineers

Why immerse students in nature? This talk explores the intersection between science, design, and engineering.“Learning about the natural world is one thing; learning from the natural world, that’s the profound switch.”

 

Do schools kill creativity?

Saving the best for last, I close with the most popular TED talk of all time. It gets to the heart of what is wrong with most schools, the deadening impact they have on students’ creativity, creativity that is essential to success in the STEM fields.

 

Enjoy! And if you have a favorite TED talk or comments about any of these, please share in a comment below.

~Penny

You can learn more about STEM Institute here.

Crosscutting Concepts

Here is a list:

Patterns: Observed patterns of forms and events guide organization and classification, and they prompt questions about relationships and the factors that influence them.
Cause and effect: Mechanism and explanation. Events have causes, sometimes simple, sometimes multifaceted. A major activity of science is investigating and explaining causal relationships and the mechanisms by which they are mediated. Such mechanisms can then be tested across given contexts and used to predict and explain events in new contexts.
Scale, proportion, and quantity: In considering phenomena, it is critical to recognize what is relevant at different measures of size, time, and energy and to recognize how changes in scale, proportion, or quantity affect a system’s structure or performance.
Systems and system models: Defining the system under study—specifying its boundaries and making explicit a model of that system—provides tools for understanding and testing ideas that are applicable throughout science and engineering.
Energy and matter: Flows, cycles, and conservation. Tracking fluxes of energy and matter into, out of, and within systems helps one understand the systems’ possibilities and limitations.
Structure and function: The way in which an object or living thing is shaped and its substructure determine many of its properties and functions.
Stability and change: For natural and built systems alike, conditions of stability and determinants of rates of change or evolution of a system are critical elements of study.

Structure and Function

By now, you are likely familiar with this domain of the Next Generation Science Standards, the seven Crosscutting Concepts, ideas that bridge all the science content areas, from amoebae to supernovae.

Here is another list:

The Family Is All There Is
by Pattiann Rogers

“Think of those old, enduring connections 
found in all flesh–the channeling 
wires and threads, vacuoles, granules, plasma and pods, purple veins, ascending 
boles and coral sapwood (sugar-
and light-filled), those common ligaments, filaments, fibers and canals.

Seminal to all kin also is the open 
mouth–in heart urchin and octopus belly, in catfish, moonfish, forest lily, and rugosa rose, in thirsty magpie, wailing cat cub, barker, yodeler, yawning coati.

And there is a pervasive clasping 
common to the clan–the hard nails
 of lichen and ivy sucker 
on the church wall, the bean tendril 
and the taproot, the bolted coupling 
of crane flies, the hold of the shearwater
 on its morning squid, guanine 
to cytosine, adenine to thymine,
 fingers around fingers, the grip
 of the voice on presence, the grasp 
of the self on place.

Remember the same hair on pygmy
 dormouse and yellow-necked caterpillar, 
covering red baboon, thistle seed 
and willow herb? Remember the similar
snorts of warthog, walrus, male moose
 and sumo wrestler? Remember the familiar 
whinny and shimmer found in river birches, bay mares and bullfrog tadpoles, in children playing at shoulder tag on a summer lawn?

The family–weavers, reachers, winders 
and connivers, pumpers, runners, air and bubble riders, rock-sitters, wave-gliders, wire-wobblers, soothers, flagellators—all
 brothers, sisters, all there is.

Name something else.”

“the hard nails of lichen” and moss

If you are not familiar with the poetry of Pattiann Rogers, you’re in for a treat. Here is a poet who has beautifully captured the notion of Crosscutting Concepts; they run throughout “The Family Is All There Is.” The patterns of “open mouth” and “clasping.” The structure and function of “the channeling wires and threads.” The system of kinship among all living things … “the family is all there is.”

Arguably the theme of this poem is “all things are connected.” And isn’t that, in essence, the great understanding that the NGSS Crosscutting Concepts lead us to? Don’t they guide and promote our ability to see those connections, those commonalities? And doesn’t Pattiann Rogers do the same in that poem, in the grand tradition of the Metaphysical Poets.

So, in case you haven’t crossed her path before, let me briefly introduce her to you and then to what I think is one of the major implications of her work for educators and specifically for those of us in STEM education.

A brief biography: Pattiann Rogers was born in 1940 in Joplin, Missouri. Her mother was a schoolteacher. Pattiann went to the University of Missouri where she met her future husband, John Robert Rogers, in French class. She completed her degree in English literature, and the couple married in 1960. While John completed his PhD in Physics, Pattiann worked as a kindergarten teacher. She and her husband had two sons, John and Arthur, and by the birth of their second son were living in Houston, where her husband did geophysical research for Texaco while pursuing postgraduate training in geology at the University of Houston. Meanwhile, Rogers devoted herself, during their early years, to raising the couple’s two sons, eventually enrolling in a graduate program in creative writing at the University of Houston and earning her MA in 1981, the same year she published her first book of poems, The Expectations of Light, which received an award from the Texas Institute of Letters and prompted critic Peter Stitt to comment on her “sophisticated incorporation of modern scientific thinking into poetry.”

Rogers’s eldest son John earned a PhD in physics at MIT and is now celebrated as one of the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana’s “star professors” and one of the leading material scientists in the world. In fall 2016, he will be leaving the U of I to become the Louis Simpson and Kimberly Querrey Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and Medicine in the Simpson Querrey Institute for BioNanotechnology, Northwestern’s newly endowed center for biointegrated electronics. He and his research team have developed a wireless antibiotic implant that dissolves after a patient’s treatment is complete. In 2013 the group developed a tattoo-like sensor that can measure brain waves, heartbeats, and the contraction of skeletal muscles.
That was a mouthful.

But I wanted to include it to suggest the way in which the arts and sciences can marry, can feed each other (read inspire), and basically operate as one family within the human intellect. Far from being the two separate cultures C. P. Snow described in 1959, they are, ideally and quite appropriately, helpmeets. Snow believed that Britain, his country, had privileged the humanities over the scientific and engineering education he felt necessary to manage the modern scientific world. We certainly don’t do that in today’s United States. In fact, we don’t seem to privilege either the Arts or the Sciences, if the time spent on those disciplines in our schools and if what is tested, i.e., valued, are any indication. But perhaps, united, both science and art stand a better chance.

Let’s take an excerpt from another of Pattiann Rogers’s poems, “How the Body in Motion Affects the Mind.”

“We are bound by the theorem of sockets and joints,
Totally united with contraction and release.
The idea of truth cannot be separated
From the action of the hand releasing
The stone at the precise apogee of the arm’s motion
Or from the spine’s flexibility easing
Through a wooden fence. The notion
Of the vast will not ignore the arm swinging
In motion from the shoulder or the fingers
Clasped together in alternation.

And when the infant, for the first time,
Turns his body over completely, think
What an enormous revelation in the brain
Must be forced, at that moment, to right itself.”

I can’t help but notice in this poem what we’ve come to call scientific thinking, the Wheel of Inquiry. When you reflect on the NGSS, specifically the eight Scientific and Engineering Practices, the observation, the awakened curiosity, the questioning, the developing of models, all come into play in the work of this poet and arguably that of artists everywhere. Artists too are observers, problem solvers, investigators of discrepant events, and communicators of what they learn from their explorations of the world.

It’s easy to see why Rogers “is known for verse that both embraces the natural world and unfolds the complexities of science.” Roald Hoffmann, Nobel laureate in chemistry said, “I’ve never seen nature observed as closely, nor transfigured by human language, as in Pattiann Rogers’ poetry.” If you want to further explore the work of Pattiann Rogers, a good place to start is to dive into Song of the World Becoming: New and Collected Poems 1891-2001(2001). Her poems are an education in ecology, astronomy, biology, and in the vocabulary of science and scientific observation. I also highly recommend her reflections on her writing in The Dream of the Marsh Hen: Writing as Reciprocal Creation (1999). Both books are seedbeds from which teachers can generate arts based and science connected activities for their students, by activating students’ curiosity and imagination. And to delve into the works of other poets who have taken science and math as their own fertile field, have a look at Verse and Universe: Poems about Science and Mathematics (1998). Pattiann Rogers is included in this anthology, and so is chemist Roald Hoffmann.

Image: J Brew via Flickr (Creative Commons)

So just maybe the ultimate Crosscutting Concept is that science and art are fundamentally related, the thought processes of scientists and artists more akin than surface appearances would suggest. Part of our task then as teachers and as a society is to erase the artificial divide between the two and the notion that we have two competing cultures, as if there could possibly be a competition at that most fundamental of levels — the working of the human mind. And that would logically lead us to very thoughtfully tuck a capital A into STEM right after the E.

As Pattiann Rogers states in The Dream of the Marsh Wren. “It has seemed to me impossible to live in our world, to survive — the split, the rending being too great — if a union could not be found and created within these two ways of knowing, the artistic and the scientific, both so essential and so present in our lives. I believe that the union is there and only lacks expression to bring it into reality.”

~ Penny

To learn more about STEM Institute, click here.