Last evening I had the pleasure of joining
#ngsschat for the first time. I was so impressed by the
conversation surrounding the next generation science standards specifically focusing on modeling in science education. The moderators
+Tricia Shelton and
+Fred Ende did a great job guiding the discussion and really got me thinking about how rather than a content change, part of the idea behind the NGSS is the idea of
how science is taught.
Vocab Vs. Understanding
One of the main ideas that I was thinking about was how in many cases science education has become more about vocabulary memorization than actual scientific thought or discovery. When students are able to create and manipulate their own models to help them understand topics that are difficult or impossible to study in the classroom, we encourage them to expand their scope of comprehension.
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| Here students modeled rock abrasion using bottles and marble chips. |
Students Create Understandings
The participants in this chat seemed to agree for the most part that static teacher facilitated models were less effective than models that students manipulated. Even more effective were models and representation that the students came up with themselves.
Where Do We Take This?
Getting students to think about science as a process, not just vocabulary is so important. Creating more meaningful opportunities for models to be used in an ongoing fashion seems to me to be a central idea in these new standards. These are exactly the innovations that demonstrate how essential it is to update our expectation of both learning and students. I'm viewing this shift as an opportunity to improve the caliber of my curriculum to more fully match scientific thought- which will ultimately improve students scientific thought process.
