Small World Consulting

To be clear, this post will not answer the question “What resource should we use?”. Hopefully, however, it will provide some meaningful guidance. 

I recently received a query along these lines from the Head of Teaching and Learning from a school that I worked with intensively before COVID and once or twice since then. 

This particular leader recognized that educators across K-10 (an IB DP school) were using many different resources to create their NGSS aligned storylines (units). This was raising a few red flags and this individual was asking for “advice or a recommendation regarding a primary resource for supporting the NGSS standards.” 

It was also shared that the resources at play at this school included: “Mystery Science, Generation Genius, Study Island, Open Science Ed, Prentice Hall Explorer Series, and several others also in play.” 

In short, I do not think there is one resource we should be asking all educators at our schools to use. OpenSciEd  (OSE) is an amazing, high quality, soup to nuts freely available resource – but it isn’t for everyone. Without some professional development for the resource from someone in the know or a truly dedicated leader willing to make sense of the resource and do the planning for the team, many K-5 educators will find it overwhelming and may not follow through with the resource (totally understandably!). I have worked with some schools that have found some K-5 Amplify units (not free) that have worked well for them. I have also seen some very exciting storylines that educators have created leveraging local phenomena and using a variety of resources to drive learning (including Mystery Science, OSE and others). 

So what to do? Here is an excerpt from my reply to this query. I hope it helps. 

I think we need to make sure educators are revisiting the standards and foundational instructional shifts before each unit. Elementary teachers have so many responsibilities that they will sometimes engage students in science learning without a clear understanding of what science ideas, practices and ways of thinking (CCCs) students are meant to take away from a lesson or unit. In middle school it is similar but different. Educators know their content deeply as well as the SEPs and CCCs, but often aren’t clear on the elements (grade band specific ways the standards ask students to engage) of the practices or crosscutting concepts. And in high school, for better or worse, educators know what students need to be successful on the IB or AP and adjust instruction accordingly. I speak from experience on this last one.  

I think an important first step is to standardize the way the units are planned. Using a common science unit planner template for K-10 can help ensure that educators have unpacked the three dimensions to the element level (i.e. identified the learning / assessment targets for each of the three dimensions of their standards), are also driving instruction with phenomena (because these key elements are part of the unit plan template) and are clear on their driving question. 

In addition, as I imagine we would want in plans for every subject, key content, practice(s) and crosscutting concepts that are meant to be emphasized in each lesson are identified. In my experience, educators sometimes go into a lesson not having a clear sense of what science idea students should be taking away with them, what practice(s) students should be engaging with or crosscutting concepts students should be leveraging in their “figuring out.” This should help. 

And second, I think there needs to be time specifically allocated prior to each science unit for unpacking the bundle of standards (again). Yes – it has likely already been done and is evident in the unit planner, but going through the process again as a team and having a conversation about what science ideas, practices and crosscutting concepts we have agreed that we are hoping students take away (and we are assessing) – and ideally revisiting how we might collect that evidence – is important. Most years at our schools find new teachers in each grade. They were not there for the original unpacking or involved in unit development. If we imagine two teachers engaging students with the same curriculum – one that is very clear as to the learning goals and one that is not – I would argue that the learning between those two groups will vary significantly. 

So I guess that is my advice. 1) Implement a science specific unit plan that IDs the ‘elements’ of the standards (which are our assessment targets), includes key aspects that we expect to see in instruction (like phenomena) and that IDs learning targets by lesson (this may take a while to get in place but the other stuff is absolutely essential prior to the beginning of instruction). 2) Allocate about 35 minutes prior to each unit for educators / teams to meaningfully unpack their PEs and have a friendly protocol and clear outcomes in place for the process (to include IDing anchor and lesson level / investigative phenomena). 

I’m attaching a unit planner that I have shared with schools here (see link above) so you can get a sense of what one might look like. There is no reason a Grade 1 unit planner would need to be any different from a grade 9 unit planner.

As a final note – I was able to sit down with a few individual educators at the NESA ETI last week and walk them through the OpenSciEd resource. They were blown away by how complete the resource was. If there is anyone out there who might be interested in learning more, don’t hesitate to reach out. I would be happy to give a quick tour.  

If you have read this far, I would love to hear your thoughts on this. I field this question often. Where are you in your school’s journey? And of course as always – feel free to reach out with any questions.