The Next Generation Science Standards envision students learning to think like scientists and engineers in the classroom. This is a new approach to learning that gives students the opportunity to strengthen their critical thinking skills while making personal, real-world connections to the subject matter. It challenges students to take the lead in their own investigations and engineering projects, just like scientists and engineers do.
As schools implement NGSS and work to achieve this vision, there are inevitably some challenges that will come to the forefront. This article identifies five common pitfalls facing K-8 educators who are implementing NGSS in the classroom, and how to avoid them.
1. Covering One NGSS Standard at a Time
Unlike more traditional approaches to teaching science, the Next Generation Science Standards are not designed to be stand-alone, isolated concepts. Instead, they are designed to intersect and connect with many other standards as students build on the knowledge they already know while acquiring new knowledge during their current studies
NGSS science instruction provides students with a framework and strengthens the critical thinking skills they need to better understand the world around them. As students build on their own knowledge from one year to the next, the NGSS connects key concepts in a systematic way. Utilizing a science curriculum that is specifically designed for NGSS goes a long way towards helping educators avoid the common pitfall of building their lessons in isolation, without thinking about what students have already been introduced to and what they’ll learn throughout the rest of the year.
To ensure success as you implement NGSS, your curriculum needs to be intentionally scaffolded and promote the intersection of key concepts from August through June, as well as from kindergarten through grade 8 and beyond.
2. Requiring Students to Be Quiet and Remain in their Seats
As we work to engage our students to think like scientists and engineers in the classroom every day, the curriculum is just one piece of the puzzle. In addition, classroom cultures will also need to change to encourage students to act like scientists and engineers. Hands-on science and engineering practices provide a framework of expectations that are intended to be nurtured from kindergarten on.
To avoid this common pitfall, educators must move their classrooms away from a quiet, passive learning environment towards a culture of thinking that encourages hands-on, student-led inquiry. Students have a chance to think deeper and learn from one another in small-group learning environments where students are leading their own investigations and in classroom discussions where different viewpoints are encouraged.
This culture shift needs to begin early in a student’s career. It's important to start nurturing critical thinking skills and high student engagement expectations as early as kindergarten. If you're waiting until grade four or grade eight, it’s too late, in part because of the three-dimensional nature of the standards, which build on students’ skills and knowledge from year to year.
3. Unproductive Student Tasks and Classroom Assignments
Part of this new learning environment involves an emphasis on using real-world phenomena, what NGSS calls anchor phenomena, as the context for actively engaging students in science and engineering practices. Anchor phenomena are complex events and processes that can be observed in nature. In the classroom, we can read about them, watch videos about them, discuss their impacts, and investigate why and how they occur.
This is an opportunity for students to link what they are studying in class to things they have experienced outside of it. They can come up with their own questions about the phenomenon, just like scientists and engineers do. This encourages students of all different levels to play an active role in class by bringing their own unique perspective to the investigation.
When looking at your own curriculum, ask yourself before each class:
- How can students link this lesson directly to their own experiences?
- What opportunities will students have to engage hands-on with elements of the anchor phenomena?
- What materials do we need to do this?
When we introduce anchor phenomena in our classrooms, we give students a chance to build a better understanding of the world around them. We provide them with the opportunity to practice the critical thinking skills they will use to answer complex questions in the future. Anchor phenomena also provide students a chance to connect personally with the lesson, as they link what they are learning to real-world events. This helps improve student engagement and teaches students that they can learn a lot from the different perspectives and experiences of their peers.
4. Viewing the NGSS Learning Environment as a Waste of Time
Educators who are used to a more traditional learning environment may not initially see the value in the NGSS learning environment. When these educators see students having difficulty as they work through the process of planning an investigation or developing a model, they may consider that struggle as a waste of time and want to step in and save their students from the struggle by simplifying or telling their students what to do next so that they can all move on quickly.
What all educators need to recognize is that these struggles can be a productive and important part of the learning process. They are in fact a result of students internalizing the science and engineering practices and developing those higher order thinking skills—the ability to create, evaluate, and analyze —so they can apply what they have learned to new contexts.
5. Assessing Students Using High-Stakes, Infrequent Summative Assessments
Historically, educators have used summative assessments to measure student progress. A summative assessment comes at the end of a unit, making it a high-stakes event for students that often relies on memory. In contrast, formative assessment occurs frequently as part of the lesson. This provides students low-stakes opportunities to check in with their teacher, who can both evaluate their progress and provide targeted feedback.
It is the job of a formative assessment to give teachers a look at where their students are in the spectrum of mastery. With more personalized feedback early on, students can inform their approach and better understand what’s expected of them. This allows them to incorporate the results of the assessment into their decision making process when planning their own investigation. It also teaches students an important lesson – we can learn from our mistakes as well as our successes.
When implementing the NGSS, assessments should be primarily formative to accelerate learning and encourage creative thinking and engagement, blurring the line between instructional and assessment activities. Observing a student at any point in a next-generation classroom yields information about where that student is on their level of mastery of the science and engineering practices. To promote creative thinking, we must allow time and space for students to struggle. ,
Avoiding these five common pitfalls requires educators to understand the shifts called for by the Next Generation Science Standards, and how teaching and learning processes and classroom cultures must change as educators successfully implement the new standards.
