3D Fizzles in NGSS

A 3-D model of curriculum, teaching, and learning has a keystone proposition at its center. As we’re all science teachers, we can recognize it as a simple, quasi-chemical equation with roots in the 2-D content-process model.

There they are on the left side, the three dimensions of curriculum, teaching, and learning:

concept, process/skill, content

understand, do, know

When — with guidance from you — your kids combine these three cognitive reactants, their higher-order thinking ignites. The flame burns brightest when the reactants are pure and combined in the optimum proportions. This blog is all about getting that cognitive chemistry right, and it will be a phenomenally positive excursion, I assure you. But the springboard is the need, and the need is dire. Our starting point is to see the NGSS for what it is, and the sight isn’t pretty. Let’s rip off the bandage and then figure out how to heal what ails science education.

Although the NGSS got the 3-D equation right, the quality of two of its reactants is embarrassingly poor. Combined, they yield little more than a warm fizz.

The NGSS calls its content dimension disciplinary core ideas, a contradiction in terms carried through to its substance. It’s an undifferentiated mixture of disciplinary content information and, as we’ll see, some 35 core, generic ideas at the center of science. Isn’t this a reasonable definition of a cross-cutting concept? It seems the committee of 18 university professors who gave us the NGSS’s recipe for 3-D teaching and learning didn’t do the prep work of defining terms and purifying ingredients. Their disciplinary core ideas are a mixture that differs only in name from 2-D’s definition of content.

Oops. Contaminated reactants don’t promise a productive reaction.

The seminal committee proposed only seven concepts that cut across all of the physical, life, and earth sciences.

That’s it? Seven? Did the proposition even pass the smile test for the 18 scientists on the committee, almost certainly immersed in their own science practices? Maybe they were complimenting us plebeian teachers. Somehow, our magical instructional talents are supposed to stretch seven highly diluted concepts across 12 years of contaminated disciplinary content to create in our students a roaring flame of higher-order thinking . . . Really?

And to make sure we work the specified miracle with our kids, the NGSS is going to test them on how HOT they are. The bar is set high, very high, because, of course, wishful thinking works with kids. Psychometricians go to work over the summer. In time for our September return to the classroom, they send a detailed profile of our kids’ NGSS grades to our principals. The principals are then required to evaluate our professional performance as miracle workers.

Let’s be real: Chemical and cognitive reactions don’t work when both the proportion and integrity of two out of three reactants are wrong, regardless of how good we are as chemists.

Before we science educators repeat history and spend the next two decades beating our heads against the NGSS wall, let’s figure out for ourselves how to make the 3-D keystone equation work for our kids in our classrooms.

Let’s start with how to purify the two compromised reactants, the concept and the content.

Stay tuned.