What will be different this time? Thoughts on NGSS implementation Part 2

A brief recap:

This is the second post in a series of posts on The Next Generation Science Standards. See Part 1 here. This series of posts is intended to raise issues of national importance related to the implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and to dig into the question in the post's title. Part 1 ends with some discussion of how the now 20-year-old The National Science Education Standards (NSES) was a good document that envisioned sweeping change to how K-12 science is taught. That description fits the NGSS as well. I argue that the NSES didn't drive much change in actual teaching practice, and worry that the current efforts won't either.

I received a fair amount of engaging feedback. Some responses to that feedback is included within the post, but I also included a bulleted list (below the questionnaire) with some of those issues, in bold, with a bit of elaboration from me.

Part 3 will focus on responses to the premortem exercise included in this post.  

And onto why this time will be different:

You. Us. I hope. We're what's different. I hope. But for us to be different, we actually need to do things differently this time around. If we keep doing what we're doing, well, we'll keep doing what we're doing.

I am saying some things that plenty of people want to hear - that I think the NGSS have the potential to transform K-12 science education (and maybe K-12 education more broadly), I'm also saying something that many people don't want to hear. We're not on track to reach that potential. Part of what I'm up to here is prodding you to convince me I'm wrong. By doing so, I may be also prodding you to more action than you otherwise would. 

Go Fever

The Freakonomics Podcast episode, "Failure is Your Friend" includes a good discussion of "Go Fever." That's a term from NASA that was used in diagnosing what went wrong to cause the Challenger explosion. Engineers knew that the O-rings weren't designed for the cold temperatures experienced on the morning of the launch, but those engineers were over-ridden by bureaucrats with Go Fever.  Wikipedia nicely describes it:

In the US space industry, "go fever" is an informal term used to refer to the overall attitude of being in a rush or hurry to get a project or task done while overlooking potential problems or mistakes. "Go fever" results from both individual and collective aspects of human behavior. It is due to the tendency as individuals to be overly committed to a previously chosen course of action based on time and resources already expended (sunk costs) despite reduced or insufficient future benefits, or even considerable risks. It is also due to general budget concerns and due to the desire of members of a team not to be seen as the one who is not equally committed to the team's goals or to be the one interfering with the team's progress or success. The term was coined after the Apollo 1 fire in 1967 and has been referred to in subsequent NASA incidents such as the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986 and the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003.^{[citation needed]} "Go fever" can also be similar to the groupthink phenomenon, where a group may end up making a bad decision for the sake of cordiality and maintaining the group's atmosphere; coined by the social psychologist Irving Janis in 1972.^[1][2]

It's worth pondering: Do we have Go Fever about the NGSS? Are we making catastrophic mistakes because we feel a strong need to get going already?

I'll confess that I worry both about going to slow and going to fast. Can we figure out how to hit just the right speed? Clearly, we need to move forward, and, there is a sense of urgency. It's also fairly clear to me that, at least in some states (including my own state of New York), the Common Core was rolled out too fast and that caused substantial problems. Can we learn lessons from that experience and avoid repeating the same mistakes?

Doing a "premortem" on the NGSS

Gary Klein developed a process for predicting and preventing project failures he dubbed a "premortem." Klein's article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), "Performing a Project Premortem" offers a concise description of the process that is also discussed in that same Freakonomics Podcast episode mentioned above, "Failure is Your Friend." I highly recommend giving it a listen after you've finished reading (and responding!) to this post.

I'm asking you to participate in an online version of premortem on the NGSS. Here's a long quote from the HBR article on premortems:

"A premortem is the hypothetical opposite of a postmortem. A postmortem in a medical setting allows health professionals and the family to learn what caused a patient’s death. Everyone benefits except, of course, the patient. A premortem in a business setting comes at the beginning of a project rather than the end, so that the project can be improved rather than autopsied. Unlike a typical critiquing session, in which project team members are asked what might go wrong, the premortem operates on the assumption that the “patient” has died, and so asks what did go wrong. The team members’ task is to generate plausible reasons for the project’s failure.

A typical premortem begins after the team has been briefed on the plan. The leader starts the exercise by informing everyone that the project has failed spectacularly. Over the next few minutes those in the room independently write down every reason they can think of for the failure—especially the kinds of things they ordinarily wouldn’t mention as potential problems, for fear of being impolitic. For example, in a session held at one Fortune 50–size company, an executive suggested that a billion-dollar environmental sustainability project had “failed” because interest waned when the CEO retired. Another pinned the failure on a dilution of the business case after a government agency revised its policies.

So, imagine that it's 2026. School science teaching and learning looks much as it did in 2016. Maybe some of the vocabulary has changed, but what kids and teachers are actually doing in most classrooms is largely the same, and the outcomes are largely the same. Collaborations across grade levels remain uncommon, as is interdisciplinary teaching. The focus of instruction and assessment is largely at the knowledge level of Bloom's Taxonomy (but, of course, things are different in your classroom). Why didn't NGSS change things? What went wrong? What did we fail to do or do badly? Or was it just a big and complicated bad idea to begin with?

Think about those questions as you read on. In just a couple of paragraphs time, you'll have an opportunity to share answers to those questions, and a couple more in Google Form, and you'll be able to see what others are saying. I was pleased by how many folks sent me emails after Part 1. Some of you may be able to cut and paste from those emails into the form.

Below the form are some ideas that came from readers of Part 1 along with my thoughts on those comments. You might wish to read that before completing the premortem. You may also wish to look at "Putting a hyper-dimensional peg in a round hole: Addressing the mismatch of NGSS and the structure of schooling", a Prezi that's included in the Additional Resources section at the end of the post. But you can dig right in without looking at that stuff.  

Feedback on Feedback on Part 1

General ideas that I received through email, Facebook, or comments on Part 1 are in bold with my comments following. I'm delighted at the volume of feedback I received and regret that I can't address every last bit of it. The below teases out some of what I thought were the big ideas. 

• Schools didn't create poverty and it's unrealistic that they fix poverty. True that. But schools, I hope, are an integral part of the solution, and integral is italicized on purpose. The structure of middle and high schools, and of undergraduate college instruction, is generally poorly integrated within itself let alone within its community. Interdisciplinary connections within the school need fortification. Connection of school content to the world outside of school also needs fortification. I recognize that and (obviously) can't do it justice in a paragraph, but it does deserve acknowledgment. 
• Claims of "We're already doing this!" are probably mostly exaggerations. One important piece of why it's unlikely that you're already teaching in ways that satisfy NGSS expectations is it's not something that one teacher can do alone, unless they're really alone, like in a one-room schoolhouse. That's probably not you. Of course, "you" can be singular or plural. If you think you, in the collective sense of the term are already doing it, that makes it more likely that you are. But if you think that you means a really big you, as in most of the teachers who attend the state science teachers conference, or most of the teachers in a district with more than a dozen teachers teaching science, then you are probably wrong. We're just not there yet. Here's another take on I already do NGSS... No You Don't (suggested by a reader of Part 1).
• Facts are essential, and, darn it, I'm focused on teaching facts.  Of course facts are essential, but the facts have been the heart of instruction for years - centuries, even. And those practices have consistently yielded (mostly) scientifically illiterate graduates. Biology is the high school science course that very nearly every high school student in the United States takes. That too has been true for decades. And, it's been true for decades that the typical high school biology text has more new vocabulary than the typical first year foreign language text. And, I think you'll agree, that most high school graduates have a very weak grasp on the basics of biology. Those folks that have a good grasp of facts within a discipline have a conceptual framework that pays attention to the important connections amongst the facts. I argue that those connections are as important as the facts themselves. This idea is backed up by solid research on How Students Learn Science. (At least check out the introductory chapter. Please.)
• Starting with A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts and Core Ideas makes sense. Yep. I should have said so more clearly. 
• What gets tested (or otherwise assessed) is what gets taught, though clearly there are many teachers who go above and beyond (or go different from...) what's assessed on the state test, or whatever test your students may be subjected to. The clauses in parentheses are important. Assessments don't have to be tests, though it's difficult to move away from that simple and comparatively inexpensive approach. For a lot of reasons, we need to figure out how to make that move. Digging into that will have to wait for another post. The parenthetic "or go different from..." is important because going above and beyond what's assessed might imply doing more - implying a change in quantity of content rather than a change in quality or nature of content. You will find some insights into this in the Classroom Sample Tasks found on the Resources page of the NGSS website.

Additional Resources + Don's Bona Fides

A subset of the Additional Resources repeated from Part 1. 

NGSS & the New York State Science Strategic Plan: Implications for Teachers

Putting a hyper-dimensional peg in a round hole: Addressing the mismatch of NGSS and the structure of schooling

Don's bona fides

I am amongst the cast of thousands who have contributed to these standards, both at national and state levels. I was a member of the Earth and Space Science Design Team for A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts and Core Ideas, the document that serves as the foundation for NGSS, and I served on the New York State Statewide Leadership Team for Next Generation Science Standards Development, and was part of STANYS's Earth science group that provided feedback to the New York State Education Department on the standards. I have also led or been a leader for a number of workshops and presentations on the NGSS. Two of those are included in the Additional Resources section at the end of this post. And, I've got nine years of experience in the high school classroom, mostly teaching Regents Earth Science, and eight years of experience as a professor of science education at Kalamazoo College, Cornell University and Colgate University. For the last eight years, I've worked for the Paleontological Research Institution, its Museum of the Earth and its Cayuga Nature Center where my current position is Director of Teacher Programs. This month marks my 30th year as a professional educator. In other words, I've been thinking this stuff for a long time.

While I have been involved enough to have good knowledge of the standards, my role is admittedly small compared to many, many others.

What will be different this time? Thoughts on NGSS implementation Part 1

Part 2 is now posted here. It uses an embedded questionnaire to gather your insights.

While this post was inspired by The draft New York State P-12 Science Learning Standards (NYSSLS) that are now available online, I hope it has relevance beyond New York State. This series of posts is intended to raise issues of national importance related to the implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and to dig into the question in the post's title. New York's draft standards are close cousins of the NGSS, which are national in scope, but not federally funded or mandated. Throughout the post, I'll largely treat the two sets of standards as one as they are so very similar.

There is a short appendix at the end of the post specific to New York. If that's not of interest, skip it. There's also an appendix offering up my bona fides for commenting on these issues. You can skip that with impunity as well.

Complexifying the Seemingly Simple and Simplifying the Seemingly Complex

Whether talking about the NGSS, or New York's version of them, the cartoon above has some relevance. The cartoon resonates partly because the simplicity of the cartoon ultimately causes the cartoon to make fun of itself. It’s a simple and basically correct idea that simple ideas about complex things are usually wrong, which implies that the cartoon itself is wrong. Yet, it still holds some truth. (You might pause and ponder Occam's razor).

The NGSS is appropriately wickedly complex, as science, and the processes necessary to build deep understandings of science are complex. But the NGSS is also about simplifying science by first identifying three dimensions of science (Crosscutting Concepts, Science and Engineering Principles, and Disciplinary Core Ideas), and then a few big ideas in each of those dimensions. Each of those dimensions should be thought of as about a third of the standards. That simple conceptual framework is one of the best things about the NGSS.

But, and it is a pretty big but, that simplicity is not immediately evident, or anything close to immediately evident, when you look at the either the NGSS website or the New York draft standards. That's too bad, but it's also fixable. Click over to the NGSS website and look around. How long does it take for you to identify something that's both important about these new standards and different from what we've thought of as best practice? Or, how long would it take to do that if you'd never seen them before today? I'd argue that it might take a few hours. It shouldn't. 

A simple and important idea to grasp before digging too deeply into the NGSS

This three dimensional framework, with each dimension consisting of just a few key ideas and each being of roughly equal importance is far from the only really important change envisioned by the new standards, but it's right up there. Another important idea hitched to this is that discipline specific ideas, what we tend to think of when we think of high school and college science, are only a third of what should be taught in K-12 science education. I agree with this whole-heartedly, by the way. The Science and Engineering Practices and the Crosscutting Concepts are just as important to understand as discipline-specific ideas.

What do I think are the most shifts in the nature of science education envisioned in the NGSS?

The interdisciplinary nature of NGSS, which is closely tied to its attention to teaching about systems is, in my view, is probably more important than the idea of three dimensional science. The attention to the idea that it takes years of coordinated instruction to build deep understandings of big ideas is of similar importance. Approach the standards with these big conceptual shifts in mind:

• It is more important to understand a few big ideas deeply than it is to know lots of facts. 
• It takes years of coordinated effort to build deep understanding of big ideas. 
• There are three dimensions of roughly equal importance, one of which is (almost) what we think of as traditional school science disciplines.
• Systems thinking and interdisciplinarity are appropriately pervasive in the standards. 
• The goal is for students to explain real-world phenomena and design solutions to problems using their understanding of the Disciplinary Core Ideas, Crosscutting Concepts, and Science and Engineering Practices. 

How many clicks on the NGSS site does it take to bring out those ideas? The site includes a couple of videos that tell you that science teaching needs to change, and some of the reasons why, but they don't really give great insights into what the changes actually look like. In the video on the NGSS homepage, Fred Johnson, starting 37 seconds in, does give about 10 seconds of insight related to NGSS's interdisciplinary nature. The 11 minute video on NSTA's homepage for NGSS resources does offer a good glimpse into what teaching that aligns with the NGSS's vision might look like. That video - which isn't on the NGSS page - is probably worth your time.

It's important to emphasize that while some lessons are better suited to supporting the NGSS than others, no single lesson, by itself, should be thought of as satisfying the NGSS, or, by itself, as even necessarily aligned with the NGSS. That lesson has to be understood in the context of many other lessons, including, at least in some cases, lessons in non-science disciplines and lessons that have been or will be taught at other grade levels. That's a big, important and complex deal.

Without simple ways to help teachers begin the process of wrapping their heads around the complex ideas, too many (I think most) teachers won’t really wrap their heads around the NGSS and they’ll ultimately have little impact on classroom practice, just like the last time some pretty good standards came along.

A five minute video highlighting interactive features on the NGSS website

There are also some powerful tools built right into the NGSS website, and the standards are really thoughtfully designed for online reading. It's easier to show those features in a video than to describe them in text. There's a bit more on how to read the NGSS online in the first of the additional resources below. That piece is largely borrowed from the NGSS Structure document in the sidebar on the Standards page of the NGSS website.

Looking back to more effectively look forward

If you've been around a while, like me, I invite you to think back to 1996 when The National Science Education Standards (NSES) came out. Those standards were pretty good too. If the vision laid out there actually came to fruition, we'd be doing pretty well. I'd argue that they didn't change classroom practice very much, and I'm deeply concerned that we're largely repeating the actions of the NSES rollout. And, I'm deeply concerned that the great thinking and hard work that has brought us the fine product that is the NGSS won't do much to change what science teaching looks like and won't make K-12 students and graduates more scientifically literate.

It's been 20 years since the rollout of NSES. If you have evidence that American high school graduates are more scientifically literate now than they were then, I'd like to see it. If you have evidence that makes a causal link between an increase in scientific literacy and the NSES, I'd really like to see it. Personally, I'm not aware of evidence that shows much change - good or bad - in the scientific literacy of Americans in the last several decades. And I have looked.

Happily, these new standards represent a change in vision for the nature and structure of schooling. Unhappily, there is little recognition of the scale of change envisioned. There are, however, places where the scale of change is more clear. For example, the PEEC-Alignment draft (found on the helpful Resources page of the NGSS website) includes this idea:

"Shifting school programs to support the implementation of the NGSS will require many changes. The best response to this challenge would be to design brand new school science programs." 

That is a suggestion to redesign K-12 science from scratch, not work to force fit the NGSS into existing structures. That's a heavy lift, but essential if we actually want to change the outcomes of school science.

In the next post, I'll ask you for some input as to how we can make the rollout more effective than the NSES rollout in 1996 and more clearly raise the issue of the mismatch of the NGSS and the structure of schooling. Some of what's coming is foreshadowed in the resources below.

Part 2 is now posted here. It uses an embedded questionnaire to gather your insights.

Additional Resources:

NGSS & the New York State Science Strategic Plan: Implications for Teachers

Putting a hyper-dimensional peg in a round hole: Addressing the mismatch of NGSS and the structure of schooling

The New York Appendix

For the New Yorkers reading this, I'll point you to a survey from the New York State Education Department on the New York draft standards. The survey is open until February 5, 2016. The survey does depend on knowledge of the NGSS, that I think would take at least 20 hours of study to really provide informed responses to most questions. If you've not yet dug into the NGSS, start now and come back to the survey before the February 5 deadline. If you don't have time to do that level of preparation before the deadline, but want to give feedback, you are able to leave some questions blank, and the survey ends with open ended questions. 

Other than the extension to preschool that the New York standards include, I wish the New York Standards were the NGSS. There are costs and benefits to the tweaks made by the New York writers, and it's hard for me to see the benefits as greater than the costs. The New York standards include a few added Performance Expectations. These are shown in highlighted text. Some addition content was also added or revised and each occurrence is marked "NYSED." Adding the preschool standards makes good sense. The few other standards that were either added or revised may have some benefits, but the costs are more obvious to me. Will these changes make it so that some curriculum materials developed for the NGSS are inappropriate for New York State? If so, is that loss of resources, worth the advantage gained by tweaking the phrasing? If not, what's the point? The answers to these questions should be clearly and concisely spelled out in front matter for the standards. The answers matter for informing the selection of curriculum materials and professional development programs.

The navigability of the NGSS online platform is far superior to presentation via pdf. Of course, the number of changes between NGSS and the NY Standards is fairly small, so using the NGSS site primarily is not much of a problem. Being able to scroll over a PE and see a pop-up showing the more detailed information is valuable, and the ability to click on the related content in the connections boxes and go to that content is even more valuable. I am hopeful that the NGSS web design can be replicated for New York's use and the modifications made for New York can be placed into a platform that has the look, feel, and operability of the NGSS site.

The above portion of the appendix are generally about the standards, and not the survey. There is one particular set of items in the survey that I'd like to draw attention to, as it confused the heck out of me. In the "Coherence" section of the survey, questions 17 & 18 are as follows:

Criterion:Standards include connections across science disciplines.
Rationale for Criterion:Standards fostering recognition of knowledge and practices shared amongst science disciplines reinforce learning in one or more specific science disciplines.
-------------------
EVIDENCE FOR HOW THE DRAFT NEW YORK STATE P-12 SCIENCE LEARNING STANDARDS MEET THIS CRITERION 

17. The Science and Engineering Practices and the Crosscutting Concepts draw connections among physical sciences, life sciences, and Earth and space sciences. 

Within each Topic Area minimal connections among physical sciences, life sciences, and Earth and space science exist as presented in grades K-5. There are no apparent connections among the Disciplinary Core Ideas presented at the middle level or high school in the Topic Area arrangement. Explicit connections among physical sciences, life sciences, and Earth and space sciences could be accomplished through curriculum/course development.

Based on the evidence provided above by NYSED, the draft New York State P-12 Science Learning Standards:

• Do not meet this criterion
• Minimally meet this criterion
• Adequately meet this criterion
• Meet this criterion to a great extent

18. Additional Comments:

End of quotation

 The text in red is very confusing. This reads like an answer to the question within the question. And, while some of this is open to interpretation, some of it is flat-out wrong. To say, "There are no apparent connections among the Disciplinary Core Ideas presented at the middle level or high school in the Topic Area arrangement" is factually incorrect. On each and every page of the document, there are such connections within the Connections Boxes.

Other questions in the survey make me somewhat uneasy - some seem to misunderstand the importance of the systems and interdisciplinary nature of the scientific enterprise represented in the NGSS and target fairly specific trees whilst missing the forest. There is also emphasis on college and career readiness, without any emphasis on readiness for the duties of citizenship. 

Don's bona fides

I am amongst the cast of thousands who have contributed to these standards, both at national and state levels. I was a member of the Earth and Space Science Design Team for A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts and Core Ideas, the document that serves as the foundation for NGSS, and I served on the New York State Statewide Leadership Team for Next Generation Science Standards Development, and was part of STANYS's Earth science group that provided feedback to the New York State Education Department on the standards. I have also led or been a leader for a number of workshops and presentations on the NGSS. Two of those are included in the Additional Resources section at the end of this post. And, I've got nine years of experience in the high school classroom, mostly teaching Regents Earth Science, and eight years of experience as a professor of science education at Kalamazoo College, Cornell University and Colgate University. For the last eight years, I've worked for the Paleontological Research Institution, its Museum of the Earth and its Cayuga Nature Center where my current position is Director of Teacher Programs. This month marks my 30th year as a professional educator. In other words, I've been thinking this stuff for a long time.

While I have been involved enough to have good knowledge of the standards, my role is admittedly small compared to many, many others.