Background on Unit 1

The start of this school year has meant a move to the Next Generation Science Standards, a move that I, as a science teacher, heartily embrace. The work that I am doing here heavily incorporates the work that all of us science teachers, and especially Cari Williams, at Tustin Unified School District put in last spring and this summer, as well as work that continues today. This is available online at http://msngss.weebly.com/. Each week I am going to post a blog with a plan for the week and later a reflection on that.

The first NGSS Unit in 8th Grade Science is about how objects move and collide and as an overarching topic looks at asteroids. It is a fun unit as the connections between Earth Science, Life Science, Space, and Physics flow easily.

Before the unit itself I incorporated two activities. The first was a pre-assessment. (There is a picture below to give you an idea of what this looks like, but you can see the whole thing at the link.) The pre-assessment was done in Google Forms using the quiz feature. I incorporated some short answers, but if I were to do it again I would make it all multiple choice as the short answers need to be hand graded.

This pre-assessment, while it could be used for grouping students, was primarily designed to determine which topics my students overwhelmingly knew or didn't know going in to the unit. (In this case the main areas where less than 50% of students got it correct were motion terms, Newton's Third Law, and Kinetic and Potential Energy Conversion). This told me that I would need supplemental lessons on these topics to support the related assessments.

The second introduction activity was an article on Actively Learn. (Our district moved to this literacy tool this year, as someone that used NewsELA extensively in the past and was well used to it, I was a bit frustrated to have to learn a new tool. Now that I've used it I take it back. It took only one article for me to be a huge fan.) The articles I used were from an amazing site called Understanding Science and an article in particular about Walter Alvarez's work in understanding the extinction of the dinosaurs. 

The first performance task in this unit is a student guided research paper on any topic about the fossil record, asteroids, or extinctions. This assessment (as are all) is broken down into 4 parts, each of which the students will need to master to move onto the next. This means that in a classroom there will be students a different points in the project. My main aim these year is working on how to manage this effectively and support all student needs.

This performance task introduces DCI LS4.A: Evidence of Common Ancestry and Diversity (this DCI will also be addressed in the third unit of this year which focuses on evolution), SEPs on Analyzing and Interpreting Data and Scientific Knowledge is Based on Empirical Evidence, and lastly CCCs on Patterns and Order and Consistency in Natural Systems.)

With this unit and throughout the entire year, the focus is to create a student-centered culture in our classrooms that promotes student inquiry and requires students to formulate their own understandings rather than simply providing the information they need to know. We will also be focused on meeting the district's TUSD Connect Vision which is:

We will continue to focus on including and increasing the rigor of scientific literacy in our curriculum to meet individual school site writing goals and the goals of CCSS and the NGSS.