This blog is co-authored by teachers in the Tustin Unified School District as we implement year 1 of the NGSS. The curriculum we have developed can be found at http://msngss.weebly.com/
At this point, I am going to need to turn over this blog to following along with Soohee Lee and Ashley Dunbar from Orchard Hills School. This year has become a long list of to do's and this blog is one of the first things I need to take off my plate.
Soohee and Ashley will be adding their weekly agendas and resources to the Google Doc below. They label each weekly agenda by date, so your dates will not match. Just figure out where you are in the curriculum by topic to find your place.
A huge THANK YOU to Soohee and Ashley for providing this resource for us!
If you have been following along with this blog, a few things have changed over the past several weeks (especially Week 5). Although we originally planned to teach some density lessons when introducing this unit, I have taken them out to save time and since they are not found in the standards. We did, however, include lessons on the periodic table because many of us find it difficult to teach atoms and elements without first looking at the periodic table. At Utt middle school, students were most interested in learning about the periodic table on a survey. We do not need to go in deep, just surface level organization and characteristics of the elements.
I was working with two teachers at Currie Middle School to track their pacing through the curriculum, but both have been adding their own teaching styles into the mix so that it is hard for others to follow. Of course, it is OK to find your own style within the curriculum. Just be careful to not take too long on old practices that could probably be taken out as we shift to the NGSS. We are finding big differences in pacing among teachers and we are currently looking into why this might be the case in PLCs. An emphasis on hands-on labs with formal lab write ups is definitely taking up a lot of instructional minutes in science classrooms at Currie as well as having students complete journal entries. These are still valid practices in teaching science, but as we shift to NGSS make sure you are asking yourself:
Is there a clear learning goal of this learning activity?
Does it meet at least two of the three dimensions of NGSS?
Is it helping support students to meet the NGSS standards we are working on?
Are students receiving feedback to help grow their science skills?
If you are finding it hard to answer yes to the questions above, it is probably a practice that it is time to get rid of. Our curriculum is taking very long to get through and it will be tough to teach all of the standards in one year. Taking the time to really reflect on the value of our practices will help gain instructional minutes back in our classrooms.
As we move forward from this point, I will be looking at the weekly agendas of several 7th grade teachers as they work their way through our curriculum to try and piece together a weekly agenda. I may need to adjust the pacing a bit, but here are the next several weeks that will include NGSS assessment 1.1 on atomic structure and begin to introduce 1.2 on states of matter.
The modeling for 1.2 can be done in a variety of ways. Here is an example of how some students are attempting to explain their understanding in Jana's class.
For those of you who may have been following along, you will notice that this agenda has been edited to remove the lessons pertaining to density. Several of us have decided that we feel it necessary to introduce the periodic table in order to move into the first assessment on molecular modeling. However, we do not feel it is necessary to explicitly teach density since this is not one of our standards in middles school. This concept will be easily covered in high school.
In week 5, students use the IOS app Elements 4D to test predictions on the reactivity between elements. We will come back to this app in unit 2 when we begin chemical reactions.
Below is a video that shows how Soo Lee uses Elements 4D in her classroom.
In order to look ahead, I wanted to post a tentative agenda for week 4. We will be introducing the concept of density and how to use this physical characteristic of pure elements to determine unknown substances.
Angelica and I met at the start of this week to discuss our next steps moving forward transitioning from ecosystems into atoms and molecules. One way to do this is to bring back the organization of life that students learn about in 6th grade. In 6th grade, they mostly focus on the levels of cells to organisms. Now, we go down to the levels of atoms and up to the level of ecosystems or even biosphere.
We also felt that it is important to teach some of the periodic table, although we are not asked to do this in the NGSS. Two teachers at Utt Middle School, Melanie Formaneck and Claire Mathews with the support of digital learning coach Michelle Ciecek, created an interactive periodic table with articles at the top of each row to help students find the patterns and trends among the elements. You will find this in the agenda below.
We have had a change of plans as we begin the 7th grade NGSS blog for TUSD. I will now be meeting with Angelica Jimenez on Monday afternoons to create the agenda for the week. She began implementing Unit 1 last week on Wednesday, so the agendas below reflect that change.
As the week progresses, Angelica or I might edit the agenda as timing or activities need to be adjusted. We will reflect on this at the end of the week, but know that it might work best if you are a week or two behind us so that we are not changing the agenda while you are following along.
Thank you, Angelica, for opening your classroom doors for all of us and helping us document the pacing of our lessons through the unit!
