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Pandemic Impacts Educational Systems

Glen Cochrane
Suffolk STANYS Chair

The educational community is under stress that has never been seen before. Uncertainty and the lack of day-to-day and perhaps week-to-week predictability are things no one likes. The teaching model now has multiple modalities of hybrid, in school, and remote instruction. Many teachers have webcams following them in class as they concurrently teach their remote and hybrid students. It’s an impossible job of trying to equitability attend to the students on the screen and the ones in the room face-to-face. We know students learn best when in group discourse and using science materials in activities, but that is almost impossible with physical distancing. Everyone is trying to integrate compliant platforms to better engage students into the district’s Learning Management System. These strategies have given rise to many concerns. What about the inequities with students without computers and without broadband access? What about doing all this with multiple teacher preps. How do we assess students formatively and authentically when they are home? Add to that our personal fears of the disease infecting us and spreading to our families and community.

Certainly, this is an unprecedented moment with conditions we all wish never happened. My question is, so why is so much the “educational system” moving along like things are normal? I heard a teacher talking about their SLOs, administrators are pushing to get observations done. And, what about APPR? Teachers are looking at the lack of student engagement and are talking about huge failure numbers. They wonder, “How will my students learn enough to pass the regents when we meet a couple of times a week and there are no hands-on activities?” What about the students on screen time that “aren’t really there?” Teachers are trying to engage students with asynchronous activities for home-based students but where is the accountability. Besides course content, we need to consider putting efforts into social emotional learning to take care of our students and ourselves. Again, this is a very abnormal time for everyone. Students might be frightened, have experienced serious illness or death of family or friends, have experienced economic catastrophe, and are struggling with food insecurity.

Why is the educational system maintaining expectations of teachers and students as if this is a normal year? With luck, current talk has a COVID vaccine available to the general public the second or third quarter of 2021. Even with vaccines available, a significant number of people will not get one which reduces the success of heard immunity. The challenges we have now will likely continue for almost all the 2020-21 school year.

It is time for a reality check and time to face the reality of a year we wish we could forget. Let’s be positive and learn new tools to put in your pedagogical toolbox. Become a better teacher by striving to become much more adept at technology. Importantly, address diversity of students we are charged to teach. Prioritize the curriculum to what matters, not for the summative exam, but what matters to our 21 st century learners. Develop tasks that encourage and expect students to use the resources of the Internet just like we do when we are trying to figure something out. It’s not about what students can recall, but what they can do and figure out using resources. Students need to make claims using evidence-based reasoning. They need to be able to sort valid sources from mere hearsay. They need to be held accountable but should be engaged with real world scenarios and applications.

Of course, we all need to be sensitive to the realities of this frightful year, and do our best, even if we know it could be better. It’s all we can ask of ourselves.

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Moving to NYSSLS Implementation?

Where are you, your department, and your district in transitioning to New York State Science Learning Standards (NYSSLS)?  These are our current science standards, but I totally get the reluctance of some to modify since the state assessments haven’t changed.  Get ready anyway. Teachers, administrators, Boards of Education, professional organizations, NYSED, and NYS Legislators all have priorities but they are often determined by necessity, often the turn in the road ahead.  Each group needs to outline where they hope to be in a few years and then lay out a step by step plan to reach those goals for NYSSLS implementation. District administrators and teachers should plan for changes without waiting to see the new state assessments.  These “Framework based standards” are now adopted by 40 states representing 80% of all student in the US. The standards are about improved science education and preparing our students for this century and not about the summative exams.

District administrators, teachers and community stakeholders need to understand the changes and work towards an implementation plan.  PK-5 are grade banded and development of phenomena-based 3D curriculum resources is challenging so most elementary teachers need support, curriculum materials, and professional learning opportunities.  Middle schools must decide on a course map that includes all the standards (MS PEs) and somehow figure out how to handle acceleration in their HS courses. Once the middle school course map draft is outlined, PEs could be bundled, and curriculum developed.  High school science departments could look at Appendix K, the PEs for their courses, and do a cross walk with the Curriculum Cores and the NYSSLS. As an important note, you must closely look at NYSSLS and not NGSS as you dig into designing curriculum. A concerned teacher recently pointed out that HS-PS2-1 is about Newton’s Second Law of Motion but has a significant difference in the NYSSLS clarification statement … projectile motion, or an object moving in a circular motion), for objects in equilibrium (Newton’s First Law), or for forces describing the interaction between two objects (Newton’s Third Law)…   

I’d like to share some of my positive experiences and observations as we move closer to implementation.  I know student centered instruction, project-based learning, learning through case studies, and problem solving has been part of best practices in science classrooms; now NYSSLS aligns with those practices.  Elementary (K-5) is making progress in local classrooms and teachers are talking about how happy the students are to be doing science. Kids love being up and about figuring out, working in groups and engaged in learning science.  The K-2 and 3-5 progressions represented in the content (DCIs) for each grade removes some of the previously taught recall-based stuff that isn’t inclusive of all students. Some districts are choosing between various elementary BOCES and publisher-based curriculum resources to pilot or adopt.  It won’t be many years before students entering middle school will expect science to be about explaining phenomena, figuring things out, and solving problems. Some middle schools have their draft course maps and shifted entire grade levels to NYSSLS. High school programs seem to be the slowest to shift but there are some that embraced student centered instruction before NYSSLS.  Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGILs), Argument Driven Inquiry (ADI), IB, and the current AP science courses are aligned with the NYSSLS approach. I know cohorts of MS and HS teachers in the NYS Master Teachers program have been working together in transitioning their courses. Teachers collaborating, setting goals, trying new lessons, developing phenomenon based inquiry tasks, working on performance assessments and among the things that will help move us forward.

STANYS is continuing to do what we can to help the science community make a smooth transition to NYSSLS.  Through the NYS Science Education Consortium, we participated in the widely distributed White Paper on Assessment and have lobbied for funding for professional development.  Suffolk STANYS in partnership with BNL will be offering a Spring Conference March 28th.  We have Dr. Cary Sneider (lead writer of NGSS) and Dr. Victor Sampson (ADI) scheduled for workshops along with several your colleagues and folks from BNL.  STANYS is planning more PD opportunities again this summer with Paul Andersen and plans are already underway for our Annual Conference in Rochester.

Best wishes to you and your families for a wonderful year.

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Elementary Science Transition to NYSSLS

Having spent a career teaching high school science, I am now engaged with the world of elementary science. The adoption of the New York Science P-12 Science Learning Standards (NYSSLS) in December 2016 has apparently rejuvenated interest in elementary science. Recently retired (meaning time on my hands?) and involved with the transition to our new science standards based on A Framework for K-12 Science Education and NGSS, I was drawn into professional development opportunities. I’ve learned a lot about how students should learn science, reasons to shift to significant core ideas, how to incorporate engineering, provide meaningful hands-on experiences, and engage with phenomena. These standards should address the needs of all students, incorporate real-world scenarios and when possible be community-based. What really excites me the most about the NYSSLS is the impact this will have on our youngest learners.

The hours spent with our elementary colleagues has given me some insight into their challenges teaching science. Besides the many times that their students are involved in activities outside their classroom, most admit their world is driven by and focused on ELA and math. Teacher evaluation, APPR, and district initiatives typically don’t elevate science learning to the level it deserves. Many are lucky if they get a couple of hours a week of science. Unfortunately, some only do “science” by using the literacy-based science in the ELA domains and modules from www.engageny.org. I’ve seen a wide variety of programs with science “push-ins”, STEM specialists, family STEM nights, STEAM classrooms and varieties of publisher and BOCES kits. Even with that support, most admit science can be short-changed. Since the past standards outlined in Elementary Science Core Curriculum Grades K-4 isn’t grade banded, each district has been left to develop their own scope and sequence so there may be a lack of coherence or much repetition based on “favorite topics.” Students that transfer between districts and sometimes other schools within a district can miss important foundations of science literacy. Sometimes, it’s the grade 4 teachers have the primary responsibility of preparing the students for the Elementary-Level Science Test given in grade 4.

Our New York State P-12 Science Learning Standards is very different for our young learners. Grade banded P-5 with specific Performance Expectations gives teachers and curriculum designers guidance as to what students are expected to know and do at the end of instruction. Coherence is presented by the progressions in grade blocks of K-2, 3-5, MS and HS for the three dimensions (Disciplinary Core Ideas, Science and Engineering Practices, and Crosscutting Concepts). This means that students learning science using curriculums developed from the NYSSLS will experience increasing expectations in how they learn (Practices), what they learn (Core Ideas), and what they look for in the questions they ask (Crosscutting Concepts). Students are expected to construct their understandings by doing science. Much greater depth in learning occurs when the focus shifts from knowing about science to them figuring out about science.

Many elementary teachers admit to me that their students say science is their favorite subject but the teachers are looking for support. The teachers I’ve worked with are among the most pedagogically talented teachers. I have seen them run with a token of an idea and turn it into fun activities, make ELA connections, and be totally appropriate to their school community. The challenge for STANYS and the science specialists across New York is how to support the transition of elementary teachers into NYSSLS. I’ve worked as a life science consultant with teams of elementary teachers and other science specialists writing grade 1 and 2 for Science21 and I can admit it is very challenging. Many elementary teachers feel they lack the background and confidence to dive into developing curriculum for science. They also wonder what these standards will look like on the student assessment which can help when developing curriculum. Our elementary programs need a good curriculum that maintains fidelity with the intent of the new standards. The elementary teachers and administrators need the training to recognize materials that are aligned and provide constructivist learning opportunities. They should be aware of the limits of the science content in the NYSSLS so they’re not compelled to teach well beyond and be sure to address science literacy for all the students.

This is an exciting opportunity for our elementary colleagues to teach science and for students to experience science as a platform for interdisciplinary learning. It has been shown that students that learn science this way not only show significant gains in science but students of high needs subgroups exhibit high gains, and positive gains are also demonstrated in subjects other than science.* Districts need a plan, decide on resources, and provide the support for the transition to an NYSSLS based elementary science program. It’s time we take advantage of our young student’s natural inquisitiveness and sense of wonder as an opportunity to teach and for students to learn science.

*Smithsonian Science Education Center. (2015). The LASER Model: A Systemic and Sustainable Approach for Achieving High Standards in Science Education. Executive Summary. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.