Stepping Into NGSS
The easiest way to begin implementing NGSS into the classroom is very slowly. In California, full implementation with exams is not expected until 2018 at the earliest. You can find the implementation schedule here. The overlap between what teachers are already doing and NGSS is why the only change that must occur in the first two steps is awareness. Right now, practically all professional development available jumps straight to Step 4: Full Implementation without helping teachers do the groundwork necessary to build up to that. This process should take well more than one semester to complete, so do not get discouraged or overwhelmed. If this starts happening, please feel free to contact me for guidance. If you are unsure about any terms below, please see the NGSS Overview for clarification.
Step 1: Making the CCC Explicit
Step 1: Making the CCC Explicit
Continue teaching lessons as normal, except keep these concepts in mind. When you notice a lessons connects to one or more of the CCC, point it out to your students. Begin familiarizing them with the vocabulary and looking for those connections yourself. You will begin to see how they fit within lessons and tell a coherent story about how science works.
Once you are comfortable with the ideas of the CCC, make them explicit to your students. Perhaps print out these posters (shown above) to hang in your room or add them to a bulletin board. Begin to keep them in mind when planning or re-planning lessons or ask the students to find the connections themselves. CCC already exist in every lesson. The goal is to make them explicit and recognizable.
Step 2: Making the SEP Explicit
Once you are comfortable with the ideas of the CCC, make them explicit to your students. Perhaps print out these posters (shown above) to hang in your room or add them to a bulletin board. Begin to keep them in mind when planning or re-planning lessons or ask the students to find the connections themselves. CCC already exist in every lesson. The goal is to make them explicit and recognizable.
Step 2: Making the SEP Explicit
These can be found in any activity, laboratory, experiment, or investigation that students perform. The SEP make a distinction between science and engineering in terms of what the beginning and end of the process is: science asks and answers a question while engineering defines and solves a problem. The other six SEP are the tools and skills used during both scientific and engineering processes.
With these practices in mind continue teaching your lessons as normal. Pay careful attention to what students are doing during activities. Most classes do a considerable amount of math/computational thinking and analyzing/interpreting data. Think about how you could adjust activities to focus on more or different SEP in a future version and start to clarify in your mind what the practices involve. Once they are clear in your mind, begin to point out to students what they are doing and why it is important. The SEP are implicitly in many activities, and the goal is to make them explicit and understood.
Now that you have analyzed your classroom for CCC and SEP, as you plan future lessons or review old lessons, begin to include a wider variety of SEP and CCC. Not every lesson has to involve every CCC/SEP, but all of them should be practiced throughout the year.
Step 3: Shifting Content
Once you have taken stock of what you already do and gotten familiar with the CCC and SEP aspects of NGSS, it’s time to tackle the standards themselves and how the Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCI) are different from old content standards. DCI are the easiest part of NGSS to incorporate, since it is the information that has been taught for decades. Teachers are most likely already covering much more content than NGSS requires. One objection many teachers have to NGSS is that they leave out so many important topics. The beauty of NGSS is that they only require the topics that any student, STEM-bound or no, should understand. This gives students more time to dig into the most important concepts and frees them to build a solid foundation of core knowledge that depends on understanding and connections. Each teacher is absolutely encouraged to add the extra information that is necessary for more advanced courses (honors, AP, IB, etc.) or to include content they simply enjoy the most.
Each standard is a combination of one CCC, one SEP, and one or more DCIs into a Performance Expectation. They each are something students should be able to do. The web site is difficult to approach in the beginning (see here for a guided tour), but it is the starting point for beginning to see how the three dimensions are woven together. Read through the standards for your grade and subject to see how they combined the CCC, SEP, and DCI into the standards. Look at each Performance Expectation and think about how to build students up to mastering those abilities. Lessons can be scaffolded in any way that works best for the individual teacher. Each instructor can choose how to build up to them, how to break them down into smaller tasks, and how to adjust what is already taught to bring these ideas in to it. As the process of planning and preparing begins for the next year/semester/unit, start to adjust lessons keeping the standards in mind.
Step 4: Full Implementation
By this time you should have been through most of your curriculum first paying attention to places NGSS might slip in, making some new vocabulary and ideas explicit to your students, and then approaching the standards themselves. The conceptual framework of NGSS should make sense to you, and your students should begin to actively recognize that Cross Cutting Concepts and Science and Engineering Practices exist within the entire curriculum.
The final goal, full implementation, is when you take all of the work you have done and begin to fill in the rest of the details. If you have started small and worked through the steps, it will be significantly easier. These last details include making sure your assessments are aligned, updating projects, and explicitly informing the students about the new standards and how they will be covered in your course. Making the standards explicit is key. You should have a wide enough view of NGSS to be able to combine some standards into the same unit or plan projects tailored to the standards or give students options that allow them choices, but still cover the material.
With these practices in mind continue teaching your lessons as normal. Pay careful attention to what students are doing during activities. Most classes do a considerable amount of math/computational thinking and analyzing/interpreting data. Think about how you could adjust activities to focus on more or different SEP in a future version and start to clarify in your mind what the practices involve. Once they are clear in your mind, begin to point out to students what they are doing and why it is important. The SEP are implicitly in many activities, and the goal is to make them explicit and understood.
Now that you have analyzed your classroom for CCC and SEP, as you plan future lessons or review old lessons, begin to include a wider variety of SEP and CCC. Not every lesson has to involve every CCC/SEP, but all of them should be practiced throughout the year.
Step 3: Shifting Content
Once you have taken stock of what you already do and gotten familiar with the CCC and SEP aspects of NGSS, it’s time to tackle the standards themselves and how the Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCI) are different from old content standards. DCI are the easiest part of NGSS to incorporate, since it is the information that has been taught for decades. Teachers are most likely already covering much more content than NGSS requires. One objection many teachers have to NGSS is that they leave out so many important topics. The beauty of NGSS is that they only require the topics that any student, STEM-bound or no, should understand. This gives students more time to dig into the most important concepts and frees them to build a solid foundation of core knowledge that depends on understanding and connections. Each teacher is absolutely encouraged to add the extra information that is necessary for more advanced courses (honors, AP, IB, etc.) or to include content they simply enjoy the most.
Each standard is a combination of one CCC, one SEP, and one or more DCIs into a Performance Expectation. They each are something students should be able to do. The web site is difficult to approach in the beginning (see here for a guided tour), but it is the starting point for beginning to see how the three dimensions are woven together. Read through the standards for your grade and subject to see how they combined the CCC, SEP, and DCI into the standards. Look at each Performance Expectation and think about how to build students up to mastering those abilities. Lessons can be scaffolded in any way that works best for the individual teacher. Each instructor can choose how to build up to them, how to break them down into smaller tasks, and how to adjust what is already taught to bring these ideas in to it. As the process of planning and preparing begins for the next year/semester/unit, start to adjust lessons keeping the standards in mind.
Step 4: Full Implementation
By this time you should have been through most of your curriculum first paying attention to places NGSS might slip in, making some new vocabulary and ideas explicit to your students, and then approaching the standards themselves. The conceptual framework of NGSS should make sense to you, and your students should begin to actively recognize that Cross Cutting Concepts and Science and Engineering Practices exist within the entire curriculum.
The final goal, full implementation, is when you take all of the work you have done and begin to fill in the rest of the details. If you have started small and worked through the steps, it will be significantly easier. These last details include making sure your assessments are aligned, updating projects, and explicitly informing the students about the new standards and how they will be covered in your course. Making the standards explicit is key. You should have a wide enough view of NGSS to be able to combine some standards into the same unit or plan projects tailored to the standards or give students options that allow them choices, but still cover the material.