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.