Any teacher that has looked at a standards page for NGSS has wondered “where do I start?” with regards to planning and teaching lessons aligned to the new standards. It can be a daunting task for sure! In this post I wanted to share a few tips.
One first step that I always encourage is to take a close look at the National Research Council’s Framework for science education as a way to be sure one understands what is meant by “practices, core ideas, and crosscutting concepts” (the three dimensions of NGSS). In fact, the official website of NGSS has embedded links within the standards pages that direct you to the relevant page of the framework. For example, a third grade performance expectation might expect students to use the science and engineering practice of “analyzing and interpreting data,” specifically, “represent data in tables and various graphical displays...to reveal patterns that indicate relationships.” On the nextgenscience.org website, if I click on the bulleted statement describing the practice in the blue box, the link takes me to the page of the framework that describes what this practice is, how scientists and engineers use this practice, and the progression of how this practice should develop over K-12 (click the picture below to see a demonstration). For the practice of analyzing and interpreting data, I can learn from the framework that at the elementary level students should begin to collect and organize categorical or numerical data for presentation in tables or graphs that facilitate interpretation, and that the use of computers and other digital tools to enable this practice is encouraged.
The orange box (disciplinary core ideas) and the green box (crosscutting concepts) also have embedded links to the NRC Framework so you can easily learn more about each dimension. Additionally, the nextgenscience.org has links to Evidence Statements for each Performance Expectation. Evidence Statements are a good resource for understanding how a students' understanding might be demonstrated in "three-dimensional" assessments.
Once you have explored some of the performance expectations for your grade level and the NRC Framework in enough depth to feel pretty familiar with the three dimensions of NGSS, you can begin to think about how labs or other lessons can be NGSS-ified. February’s NGSS article in the NSTA journals provides one teacher’s insight. She shifted her planning and teaching of lessons* in the following ways:
Find additional support and resources for NGSS Pedagogy at this "In Your Classroom" website. These archived webinars at the NGSS@NSTA Hub are also a great support for helping you make the transition.
When you NGSS-ify lessons, you might also consider a Venn diagram framework in which you think about the lesson components and how the three dimensions either are - or are not - represented in the lesson. Sometimes the shifts in lessons will be making changes to make the connections between core ideas and the practices and crosscutting concepts more explicit for our students.
Learn more about the Venn diagram representation of three-dimensional learning:
A tool for evaluating and modifying curriculum
You are definitely not alone in trying to find or modify lessons as you implement NGSS! Click here to access a google document providing some places to start your search, such as NGSS@NSTA which has a team of teacher curators working to add resources for performance expectations at every grade level.
The word "lesson" in NGSS does not refer to a daily lesson plan - an NGSS lesson is an instructional sequence that extends over several days and contains multiple activities that teach a complete concept. And while each performance expectation explicitly connects to one practice and one crosscutting concept, it is important that instruction combines different practices and crosscutting concepts in varied ways as the core ideas are explored.
@NGSS_tweeps is a community Twitter account: each week a different educator tweets about NGSS, providing a window into their classroom