Science classrooms could soon look very different

If a third-grade student were to visit Cape Henlopen State Park, they might participate in the "Wet and Wild Animals" project.

They would study different aquatic animals' adaptations and physical characteristics that help them live in their watery world. They would then design their own creature from scratch using what they learned.

Such a lesson was developed by the Delaware State Parks to meet the Next Generation Science Standards. A separate but related effort to the Common Core State Standards for reading and math, Next Gen is an effort to build common expectations for what – and, more importantly, how – students learn in science class.

Education leaders in Delaware and the 25 other states that have signed onto the standards hope they will fundamentally transform how science is taught.

In an age when almost everyone has the Internet nestled in their pocket, memorizing facts is less useful, they argue.

"When you work as a scientist, or an engineer, or whatever you do, it isn't all about what you know. Companies are trying to find people who can innovate, who can solve problems, who can come up with new ideas," said Ross Armbrecht, a former DuPont engineer and current executive director of the Delaware Foundation for Science and Mathematics Education. "This requires a fundamental rethinking of how we teach."

Next Gen requires students to master a tightened list of essential concepts – in the lingo of the standards, "disciplinary core ideas."

They must have the skills to ask the right questions and use the scientific process to design experiments to answer those questions – what Next Gen calls "performance expectations." Finally, they must be able to cohesively explain what they know and how they learned it.

Take, for example, the aquatic animals project.

Third-graders wouldn't know it, but this lesson squarely matches the description of Life Science Performance Expectation LS1.A: "Use materials to design a solution to a human problem by mimicking how plants and/or animals use their external parts to help them survive, grow, and meet their needs."

If students can successfully perform that experiment, they have mastered Disciplinary Core Idea LS1.A: "Plants and animals have both internal and external structures that serve various functions in growth, survival, behavior and reproduction."

Put simply, the Next Generation Science Standards are a network of ideas like these, and the things students should be able to do to prove them. Those expectations are connected across grades and between disciplines, weakening barriers between biology, physics and chemistry.

Climate change, for example, is taught through both middle school and high school, with students performing more advanced experiments and mastering more complex ideas as they move along. A school near the coast might look at data for how sea levels have risen at a nearby beach.

In different grades and different classes, students might learn the chemistry behind how greenhouse gasses contribute to warming climate. They might learn the physics of how warmer oceans lead to bigger storms. And they might learn the biology of how these changes affect animal populations and how creatures adapt.

Importantly, the Next Generation Science Standards are not a curriculum. They explain what students should know and how they can be expected to show that knowledge, but they do not explicitly explain how teachers and students should "get there."

Translating the broad ideas of the standards into everyday instruction is a mammoth task that Delaware will start in earnest this fall. Getting to where everyone is on the same page will be a gradual process over the next three years.

By the 2016-2017 year, all classroom materials and assessments should fit the standards.

Leading Delaware's charge into the Next Generation standards are more than 130 educators from every school district and a majority of charter schools.

Those teachers spent much of last week in a ballroom of the Dover Downs plowing through the state's colossal pile of curricula, lesson plans, activity plans and other resources to see what fit the standards, what could be tweaked, and what needed to be tossed out entirely.

On Thursday, a team of several of the experts who wrote the standards wandered from table to table, answering questions from teachers. Those teachers will take the expertise they've picked up during the intensive camp and begin experimenting with new lessons in their classrooms, reporting back to each other regularly to see what works and what doesn't.

They will also be responsible for helping their co-workers come to grips with the standards.

"Look, this is a big, difficult thing we're going to be doing here. And there are going to be bumps along the road," said Jacquie Kisiel, a fifth-grade science teacher at Rehoboth Elementary, and one of the lead teachers. "If we do this right, we're going to be asking our students to figure out a lot of things on their own, which is a good thing. But it takes time and it takes planning for us to do that in a meaningful way."

Contact Matthew Albright at malbright@delawareonline.com or at 324-2428. Follow him on Twitter @TNJ_malbright.