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.