Thoughts on the Framework for K-12 Science Education

I've been looking at the Framework for Science Education since it was published online last week. I like that it's not just the science ideas but also speaks to how we should go about taking those ideas and making them into standards.

This section in particular (ch. 12, Guidance for Standards Developers, p. 221) stood out for me:
"That is, for a given core idea at a given grade level, standards developers should include guidance not only about what needs to be taught but also about what does not need to be taught in order for students to achieve the standard. By delimiting what is included in a given topic in a particular grade band or grade level, boundary statements provide insights into the expected curriculum and thus aid in its development by others."

This is such a powerful statement. So much of what plagues science education deals with getting caught up in the little details. Not that details aren't important, but we want to avoid continuing to make science about memorizing facts when it is really a PROCESS and a way of thinking. Yes, kids should know the key ideas and explanations of real-life phenomena (why do we look the way we do? why do we have seasons? Why do some places have earthquakes and others don't?), but it is SO easy to get caught up in minutiae and lose track of the bigger picture...especially when one considers standardized multiple choice tests.

This issue came up at the Science Instructional Leadership Team meeting this summer. We were utilizing the STeLLA science storyline program to come up with main learning goals for an investigation in the FOSS module, and there was a distinct division between some of the groups. My group had focused on the idea of food webs and feeding relationships, determining that the introduction to Mono Lake (in part 1 of the investigation) was a hook for the next few investigations and thus not central to the main learning goal. Another group disagreed, and - rather than using the standards and the big idea (food webs/energy flow) for which the Mono Lake ecosystem was merely a vehicle - they had gotten caught up in the defining characteristics of the Mono Lake ecosystem. Do students need to know about the salinity of Mono Lake in order to diagram a food web and to understand the feeding relationships that it encompasses? No, they don't. And yet these teachers - with the best intentions, I am sure - had gotten distracted by those details.

I think it goes back to what we learned at PEAK as well. As teachers, we need to prioritize. Start with the standards/the core ideas in science, then break that down into learning goals and unit objectives, then break that down into your lesson objectives. Once you have all those many objectives, you need to determine which are "essential" for understanding the core ideas, which are "important" for understanding, and which are "nice to know." Sure, it would be nice for my sixth graders to understand salinity and the effect it can have on ecosystems, but it's not essential....especially as we don't even live in a region where that's an environmental issue.

Puzzle Pieces

So I always mean to be better about blogging here, as this is a much better venue for going on about teaching than at my personal blog where my friends are far more interested in my thoughts on Captain America: The First Avenger than in the newest strategy that I'm trying.

At the moment, we've got just over two weeks before the kids come back, and it seems that the summer has just flown by. Of course, I imagine that has something to do with the two week-long conferences I attended (PEAK Learning Institute in Vail, Colorado, and the GE Foundation's Developing Futures NASA/NSTA Math-Science Integration Conference in Cocoa Beach, Florida) and the Berwick Buddy trip to Maine (also a week). It's left me with a lot of amazing ideas, but now I have to fit all the pieces together. CARE for Kids, PEAK, the 5 E's, BSCS's Science Storylines (from a district science leadership training), and several other things all need to fit into a seamless whole.

I have managed to edit my Understanding by Design Unit Template (backwards planning all the way, y'all), type up a PEAK topic planner, and merge my CIF lesson planner with a PEAK lesson planner. The last of which was the most difficult, though honestly even that wasn't as difficult as I thought it might be. I realized that all the sprinkles, showers, and drips (more on that below) fit in as transitions between the pieces of the lesson that belonged in the CIF lesson. The PEAK soak is the same as the CIF-for-science guided practice. The one awkward spot is where I have a section that could be Making Meaning (i.e. Explain) OR a sprinkle/shower/drip transition, but I suppose that really would vary just based on whether you had a lab-type explore activity that day, which would definitely require a making meaning section to the lesson, or whether you had been working on something that might not need that component. I honestly think I will tend far more to the making meaning portion of that choice, but I am hoping to be more creative with my strategies there than I have been in years past. I'd like to utilize various discussion and notebooking strategies there, as well as some PEAK engage learning strategies.

At this point, I suppose I should outline the whole PEAK water metaphor, which was a key focus in this conference that is just totally mindset-changing. The gist of it revolves around the necessity of exposing kids to content multiple times, as research has shown over and over that they need 28 or 41 or more exposures to really retain and deeply understand content (I'm sure we are ALL familiar with the never learning or crammed-for-test-and-then-forgot learning that goes on in classrooms across the country). In order to do that - to achieve what PEAK calls 28/3 (28 exposures over 3 weeks) - you need to use both pre-instruction and post-instruction. The pre-instruction primes the kids for the main content instruction, while the post-instruction reinforces the information and helps deepen their understanding. The terms are as follows (exposure is deeper each time):

Cloud - this involves having content posters up at least a few weeks ahead
Sprinkle - ex: point out posters & have kids discuss what they notice, choral repetition from visuals, brainstorming around big ideas
Shower - deeper than sprinkle, ex: content songs, choral repetition of important content, and various other strategies where kids become familiar with the basic foundational ideas for the future unit
Soak - this is the actual unit of focused instruction (this is where labs and the like would fall for science)
drip, Drip, DRIP - post-instruction of increasing depth where you intentionally revisit a topic at deeper and broader levels (they call this incremental development)...this includes a great variety of active learning, notebooking, and reflective strategies, among other things

I don't think I've really encompassed how amazing the idea is, as the training just totally opens your eyes and changes how you think about planning, but I think I've got the basics at least. I am not diving all the way into the deepest levels of planning using the PEAK ideas, as it is a bit much to do the first year, particularly with the FOSS and STC modules to juggle as well.

I think I will post more about my ideas for implementation later this weekend. I am trying to pare down my ideas so that it will be realistic. There are a great many techniques I want to try, as well as different strategies and tools, but I also need to ensure that I don't overwhelm myself. The idea is to pick just a few things to try and make sure you get down well, so I want to prioritize. Luckily, there are some things I had already started with last school year, as one of the teachers I work with had shared some of the ideas with me, so those just need to be tweaked a bit, and then I can pick out the new (to me) things that I want to implement.