Education Week - July 10, 2013 - 26

26 EDUCATION WEEK
n
JULY 10, 2013 www.edweek.org
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Standards Team Set Out With Goal of Science for All
Next Generation
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
ers said the standards and the
supporting documents that accompany
them offer an unprecedented
opportunity to push a far broader
array of students into the science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics
career pipeline.
But they also acknowledge that
raising the cognitive demands of
science education when there are
already yawning achievement
gaps between white, Asian, and affluent
students, and their poorer,
English-learning, black, and Hispanic
peers will require major
shifts in practice for many science
teachers. Eighth grade Englishlearners
who took the 2011 earth,
life, and physical sciences portion
of the National Assessment of Educational
Progress, for example,
scored an average of 106 on a 300point
scale, far below the 170-point
proficiency cutoff.
“Science really can be the great
equalizer,” said Stephen L. Pruitt,
a former high school chemistry
teacher who oversaw the development
of the new science standards
as a senior vice president at the
Washington nonprofit Achieve.
That organization was one of the
leaders of the science-standardssetting
effort. “But because science
has the unfortunate stigma for only
being for a select group of students,
we couldn’t afford to come out of
the gate without having our diversity
and equity work, and some resources
for teachers, as a companion
to the new standards.”
The Next Generation Science
Standards—through the work of
a diversity and equity team composed
mostly of classroom teachers—went
through extensive bias
and sensitivity reviews to make
sure the standards didn’t include
language with multiple meanings,
like “draw on evidence,” that
might confuse students still learning
English, for example.
The diversity and equity team
wrote a 21-page companion document
to the standards—Appendix
D—that discusses how the standards
can be made accessible to all
students and the specific instructional
approaches that teachers may
use with various types of learners.
Real-Life Examples
And, in a major effort to help
teachers, the team wrote real-life
case studies describing how effective
instruction using the new
standards might look in classrooms
with seven different types
of science learners: English-language
learners, students with disabilities,
students who are racial
and ethnic minorities, poor students,
girls, students in alternative
education settings, and gifted
and talented students.
“We wanted to show teachers
that the NGSS are doable and that
they can do this with any student,”
said Emily Miller, a 2nd and
3rd grade English-as-a-secondlanguage
and bilingual resource
teacher in Madison, Wis., who was
one of the 41 standards-writers
and a member of the diversity
and equity team. “We also wanted
to demonstrate through these case
studies that squeezing out science
in schools that are under [accountability]
pressures has been
the wrong direction. We show the
value of using a part of the day
that is among the most engaging
for kids and how you can integrate
reading and math.”
The Next Generation Science
Standards, developed over three
years by a coalition of 26 states
and some national groups, seek to
foster K-12 students’ deeper understanding
of science in part by asking
them to use the same kinds of
practices that scientists would use.
The standards—adopted so far by
Rhode Island, Kansas, Kentucky,
Maryland, and Vermont—ask students
to apply what they learn
through the practices of scientific
inquiry and engineering design.
They weave together three dimensions—disciplinary
core ideas, science
and engineering practices,
and cross-cutting concepts—and
outline clear performance expectations.
Those performance expectations
spell out the actions students
must perform to demonstrate what
they’ve learned, such as planning
and conducting investigations, analyzing
data, and building models.
Much of the push to keep traditionally
struggling students at the
forefront of the writing team as
it developed the standards came
from Andrés Henríquez, who at
the outset of the process was a
senior program officer at Carnegie
Corporation of New York,
the major funder of the NGSS. (Mr.
Henríquez is now a program officer
at the National Science Foundation.)
He has long been an advocate
for English-language learners
and other diverse learners.
Recruitment Aim
Mr. Pruitt of Achieve made understanding
the wide range of
students’ learning needs a top
priority as he helped recruit and
select members of the writing
team, which included several science
teachers with expertise in
working with diverse learners. An
often-cited critique of the Common
Core State Standards in English/
language arts and mathematics is
that the needs of diverse learners
didn’t get enough attention as the
standards were written.
“Diverse learners and equity for
all students was key to the work
from the inception of the NGSS,” said
Okhee Lee, a professor of science
education at New York University
who was on the standards-writing
team and was tapped by Mr. Pruitt
to lead the diversity and equity
team. “The common-core documents
do not have any modifications or adaptations
for diverse learners.”
When the diversity and equity
team set out to write its case studies,
team membe rs first had to develop
lessons based on some of the
standards, talk about the strategies
they would use to reach all their students,
and then teach the lesson over
a period of time and document how
it went. The studies, or vignettes, are
rich on detail, with citations on the
Students with
disabilities
Economically
disadvantaged
students
Gifted and
talented
students
Englishlanguage

learners
Students in
alternative
education
Racial and
ethnic
minorities
Girls
DIVERSE
LEARNING
GROUPS
Science Standards:
Focus on Diverse Learners
The diversity and
equity team was made
up of classroom science
teachers with expertise and
experience in working with at
least one of the target groups of
diverse learners.
Major components of
diversity and equity
team’s work:
BIAS REVIEWS
The diversity and equity team
twice combed through each
standard to review it for any
gender, language, cultural,
and contextual bias that might
present barriers to different
types of learners.
CASE STUDIES
OR VIGNETTES
Real-world, detailed
descriptions written by
teachers, who developed
lessons based on some of the new
standards, taught them over multiple
days in their home classrooms, and
closely documented the strategies
they used to reach their target
group of learners and how
students reacted.
DIVERSITY/EQUITY THEME
THROUGHOUT NGSS
APPENDIX D
A 21-page document that
accompanies the NGSS and
presents a strong case for how the
new standards are designed for all
instructional strategies the teachers
used and packed with thorough
descriptions of how students’ understanding
of content—the composition
of soil samples from different
areas of their neighborhood, for
example—unfolded at the same
time they were stretched to express
themselves in English, a language
they are still learning.
Ms. Miller, the 2nd and 3rd
grade resource teacher who wrote
the case study that focuses on
English-learners, said she hears
all the time from colleagues that
rigorous science instruction for
poor, minority, and English-learning
kids is “impossible.”
“What we hope the vignettes
show to teachers is that we are
normal teachers, just like them,
and we did this in our classrooms
and it worked,” she said.
Lesson on Matter
In the case study focused on economically
disadvantaged students,
a 9th grade chemistry teacher challenged
her students, in a multiday
lesson on matter, to explain why a
railroad tanker car had dramatically
imploded after it had been
washed out with steam and all its
outlet valves closed. She kicked off
the unit with a class discussion to
size up her students’ prior knowledge
on the molecular nature of
matter by asking them how gases
had behaved in earlier investigations
they had done. She wrote students’
answers on a chart.
After showing them the video of
the imploding tanker car, she asked
them to work in small groups to
talk about what had happened and
to develop models that would explain
the implosion. She circulated
among them, asking guiding questions
as they drew their models and
discussed what they thought had
students. It includes detailed information
on the science achievement,
demographic growth, and
effective instructional practices
for each major category of
diverse learner.
happened. One group of students
noted that they see smashed aluminum
cans in their neighborhood
all the time and that maybe an “airfoot”
had stomped the tanker down.
“What is the imaginary foot?” the
teacher asked them. “Air,” answered
one of them. The teacher told them
to add that idea to their model,
validating the students’ discussion
of smashed cans as a real-world
connection between their neighborhood
and science.
Over the next two days, the
teacher asked her 9th graders to
revise their models after conducting
simulations of the imploding
tanker with aluminum soda cans.
Working in small groups, students
filled the cans with water,
and each group subjected them
to different variables (amount of
water in the can, temperature of
a water bath for submerging the
cans, time on a hot plate, volume
of the can, and how much each
can was sealed shut) to see what
would happen. They made predictions
and defended them when
questioned by the teacher. She
also assigned students a reading
on air pressure for homework.
By the end of the unit, students
had continued to improve their
models and, drawing on evidence
from their experiments, were
able to explain why the tanker
had imploded.
Said team member Rita Janusyk,
a 4th grade teacher in a suburban
Chicago district and a former science
coordinator and director of
enrichment programs for gifted
students: “The idea was to paint a
very vivid picture of what this looks
like in the classroom and to show
SOURCE: Education Week
The team incorporated
instructional practices
and relevant research on
teaching diverse learners
throughout all the NGSS
materials.
a slice of life in a complex world of
science instruction in a particular
classroom.”
Peter McLaren, a state specialist
in science and technology for
the Rhode Island department of
education and a member of the
standards-writing team, said he
will use the vignettes for teachers’
professional development. Beyond
the descriptions of unfolding lessons
and students’ responses, he
said, the contextual information
about the historic performance
of diverse learners in science and
their increasing numbers in classrooms
that have traditionally been
populated with middle- and upperclass
white students is important
for teachers to understand.
“The case studies are really
about kids,” he said. “And for some
of my colleagues who are only now
beginning to see these kids show
up in their classrooms and are
asking themselves how they are
going to teach them, this is a tremendous
resource.”
Ms. Lee, an expert on how science
can support English-language
acquisition for ELLs, said
as a content area, science has the
strongest potential to be relevant
for students from backgrounds not
traditionally seen as mainstream.
“In and of itself, science is about
understanding and explaining
the natural phenomenon in the
context of where a person lives,”
she said. “We just have to provide
those connections and that relevance
to our students.”
Coverage of the implementation of
the Common Core State Standards
and the common assessments is
supported in part by a grant from
the GE Foundation, at www.ge.com/
foundation. Education Week retains
sole editorial control over the content
of this coverage.
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Education Week - July 10, 2013

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