Let's transition from thinking about time-on-learning to considering how best to develop your own curriculum. Designing good curriculum requires a relatively simple process:
- Ideation
- Format & Draft
- Materials Testing
- Review & Revise
- PD Training
As seen in the illustration below, curriculum development should progress from initial ideation to a formatting and drafting period, testing, reviewing and revising materials, and finally to professional development training on how best to use the materials.
Curriculum development should progress from initial ideation to a formatting and drafting period, moving then to testing, reviewing and revising materials, and finally to professional development training on how to use the materials.
Ideation
How do we translate our initial ideas into a curriculum that fully supports the Next Generation Science Standards?
Ideation should include three different areas: scope and sequence, crosscutting concepts, and the science and engineering practices.
Ideation should include three different areas:
- Scope and Sequence
- Crosscutting Concepts
- Science and Engineering Practices.
Essentially, these ideas dictate how the class is going to bridge the gap between the standards and curriculum, because the role of curriculum is to develop mastery of the expectations of the standards. Ideation is basically envisioning that bridge. For example, “I want to give my students an opportunity to explore the impact of new technology on predicting the path of hurricanes.”
Out of this comes scope and sequence. This is how the crosscutting concepts come alive, connecting one performance expectation to the next and one dimension to the next. During this step, ask yourself questions related to NGSS three-dimensional learning like:
- How are crosscutting concepts going to connect to the disciplinary core ideas? How are students going to engage in the science and engineering practices required for mastery?
Make no mistake, this is a big fish to fry. When you engage in ideation, make sure that you are thinking both grade-specific and September through June. You are building a curriculum designed in both a vertical and a horizontal fashion that nurtures students throughout the entire year and from year to year. Don’t forget to be thinking along these lines in the early stages of ideation.
Format & Draft
Formatting and drafting requires unpacking the performance expectations and putting them all together using the tools of curriculum: defining content, setting objects, planning lessons, choosing non-fiction reading and so on.
Formatting and drafting requires unpacking the performance expectations and putting them all together using these curriculum tools:
- Disciplinary Core Ideas
- Standards Unpacked by Dimension
- Teacher Content Background
- Unit Mastery Objectives
- Teacher’s Lesson Objectives
- Non-Fiction Reading
- Lesson Visuals
- Hands-On Materials Required
- Teacher’s Lesson Guidance
- Exemplars
- Embedded Assessments and Rubrics
- Answer Keys, Concept Mapping, Supports for Differentiated Instruction
Formatting and drafting defines the context of the inquiry environment. This is where each performance expectation, each standard, is unpacked and connected. To do so, we must take into account the 12 tools listed above.
This is a lot to grapple with. You not only have to ensure that the curriculum you use addresses the standards, but ensure that general classroom teachers are supported in maintaining a rigorous curriculum and aren't limited in their own understanding.
This is true even with content specialists. Just because a teacher has taught earth science every year for 10 years doesn't mean they will be comfortable with and ready to teach heredity and evolution or DNA and genetics, and so on and so forth.
In some districts, designing a curriculum that ensures that teachers are supported in this fashion is feasible.Sometimes, building a 5- to 10-person team to design the curriculum over the course of several years is less realistic, and in that case, thinking about purchasing NGSS-aligned curriculum is a better bet.
From here, we progress to drafting mastery objectives, the teacher's lesson objectives, and creating or sourcing nonfiction reading. What you're going to find is that there's really not sufficient nonfiction reading out there for the breadth of topics covered by NGSS performance expectations. It is being developed commercially, so that presents one option; the other is to design it yourself.
Most likely you will find the same to be true of both lesson visuals and the hands-on materials required for students to engage in the lessons. More and more these days, districts are returning to hands-on instruction in these full inquiry environments, which is a good thing. But, it brings in an extra element (as compared to electronic resources and apps, which have become popular in recent years). As a district or a classroom teacher, you are now faced with ensuring those materials are there.
Now let’s talk about the teacher's lesson guidance. Since you're going to be faced with veteran and newcomer teachers alike, it is important to structure lessons in such a way that sufficient guidance is provided at all levels, creating a high quality of instruction across the board. To accomplish this, teachers will need exemplars of student work, both ideal and more realistic representations, showing various strengths but not perfection. Lastly, embedded assessments and rubrics, answer keys, concept maps and differentiated instruction are all important to provide. .
Materials Testing
When we are collecting the classroom materials needed for students to engage hands-on in the study of science by designing and leading their own investigations, there are myriad options to consider. Don’t let this idea overwhelm you – instead think of it as a way to thoughtfully consider how we engage our students to think like scientists and engineers in our classrooms. We’re giving them the opportunity to experience the awe of scientific discovery in action and getting their hands ‘dirty’ is a great place to start.
When we think about the tools we use to engage students in inquiry-based learning, author and education researcher Ron Ritchart identifies in the book Creating Cultures of Thinking (2015) eight cultural forces to consider. These are time, routine, language, modeling, expectations, environment, interactions, and opportunities. Each of these “forces,” as well as how much emphasis we put on one rather than another, will impact how our students utilize the hands-on materials to think deeper.
Another challenge impacting how we choose and utilize materials in the classroom are the restraints we have as educators. Do we utilize a NGSS curriculum that comes with materials? If not, are there materials available at our school or do teachers have to spend their own resources acquiring them? Are the materials stored conveniently and ready to grab and use when needed, or are there processes that take time to check them out and/or prepare them for class?
Finally, when we think about promoting creative thinking and diversity of thought – we have to consider how our classroom materials may stymie it. If we are providing one very specific set of materials to students and then asking them to find out-of-the-box solutions to problems that matter to them, are the materials impacting their opportunity to explore something new? Are the materials driving students towards a prescribed outcome?
Review & Revise
One key to successfully implementing a new curriculum is a commitment to ongoing review and revision. Educators know that things can be rocky at the beginning when we try something new, but evaluation shouldn’t stop as soon as we get our feet underneath us. As we build cultures of learning together in our schools and in our classrooms through the implementation of NGSS, we must be open to continued improvement and to collecting and implementing feedback from our students, our peers, our leaders, and from the educational community as a whole.
The first step in a successful review and revision process is deciding on and clearly stating our team’s shared instructional vision and values. Once these are defined, we can collect more targeted data on the results of our implementation and measure that against our shared vision and values. Without a common starting point, however, the process of collecting, analyzing, sharing, and responding to the data we collect on the results of our collective efforts is not going to be as impactful. Together, teams should set and work towards their own goals and report on their progress towards meeting them.
PD Training
What makes professional development (PD) truly valuable for teachers? Historically, many people thought PD opportunities that provided immediate, actionable strategies were best. We wanted to walk away with a tool we could put into action the next day. However, according to extensive research collected by Ron Ritchhart in the book Cultures of Thinking in Action, this short-turn approach hasn’t delivered the results educators were looking for. In fact, most of these types of quick-turn strategies never make it from the PD classroom into our classrooms, and when they do, there’s no follow-up to measure the impact or to work to improve the results.
Instead, PD must support the complex, cultural shift change in education with NGSS towards student-led inquiry that promotes deeper learning. When we look at PD related to NGSS curriculum development and implementation, it’s important to start with a collective “why.” Why are we doing this – in the first place, in the long term, and at today’s PD opportunity? How does it fit into our long-term instructional vision and values? How does it align with the implementation of NGSS and our work to improve student mastery of the state standards?
PD that supports the collective understanding of these big ideas and how we can work together to design, implement, and evaluate NGSS curriculum, should come at the start of the process and continue at each stage, as we check in on our progress and align our work to our values. With the support of a strong PD effort like this, we can make the design and implementation of curriculum a much lighter lift.
