VISTAVISTA — The future of science education was beginning to take shape in Vista last week.
About a dozen eighth grade teachers and curriculum experts from Vista Unified School District crammed into a tiny backroom at Vista Innovation and Design Academy on Wednesday to design new science lessons that could have ripple effects across the nation.
The teachers are among an elite group in California working on how to implement so-called “next generation science standards” — a major overhaul of the nation’s approach toward teaching science in kindergarten-through-12th grades.
“Gone are the days when teachers stand and deliver PowerPoint (slides), and students take notes,” said Donna Markey, an eighth grade science teacher at Vista Visions Academy. “We are there to facilitate, not dictate.”
As the educators worked, they pulled out multi-colored Post-it notes and jotted down ideas for a lesson on Isaac Newton’s laws of motions, then stuck them on a poster board and shifted them around to reflect the best order. On some, the teachers scribbled down the educational standard the concept met.
“It has to make sense — it’s a story line that needs to be taught,” said Sue Ritchie, the project leader.
To test their work, the teachers will return to their home middle schools — Roosevelt, Vista Magnet, Madison, and Rancho Minerva — and teach the lesson they created.
Vista Unified is among 10 educational systems in the state — including eight school districts and two charter programs — that have been chosen to lead the California K-8 NGSS (Next-Generation Science Standards) Early Implementation Initiative.
Four of those systems are in San Diego County: in addition to Vista, they include San Diego Unified, Lakeside Union, and High Tech High, a charter school specializing in math, science and engineering in Chula Vista and San Diego.
The four-year project — run by the K-12 Alliance at educational nonprofit WestEd — is an instructional framework that all school districts in California and elsewhere might ultimately follow.
The project emerged after educational leaders nationwide met in 2010 and pushed for an overhaul of outdated science curriculum. The national standards hadn’t been touched since the late 1990s when they were reviewed by the National Research Council, an advisory body created as an independent voice on scientific matters for the U.S. government. The NRC has influence over educational standards in four disciplinary subjects: physical science; life science; earth and space science; and engineering.
The next generation standards have been created in a t effort between the National Research Council, the National Science Teachers Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Achieve, a nonprofit education reform organization.
The work “is a little under the radar,” said Trish Williams, a San Diego resident who sits on the California State Board of Education.
Williams said the new standards — and the fact that San Diego school systems are helping to shape how they’ll be implemented — “should be of interest to the biotech and STEM-related (science, technology, engineering and math) industries because it (puts) San Diego in a leadership position in the state and the United States.”
“We are out in front on NGSS,” Williams said. “We will be the first in the country to do this.”
At the core of the new standards is the belief that science no longer relies on memorization of facts and writing essays, but rather through experiments and hands-on exploration of specific subjects.
For instance, instead of memorizing vocabulary on how waves move, students might use a fish tank to observe the size of waves when some external force moves the water — and even try to relate the concept to other areas of science, like radio or air waves, or how light moves through the universe.
“It refocuses how science is taught,” said Jim Spankikow, a teacher at Madison Middle School in the Vista district.
Richie, Vista’s project leader, said that it is the job of the 10 school systems participating in the NGSS initiative to try out new ways of teaching.
Lessons learned from their mistakes have been shared with other school districts in California and other states so they’ll have a head start implementing the new standards when they become effective in the 2018-2019 school year.
Richie said she’s received telephone calls from educational experts all over the U.S. asking for insights on how to implement NGSS. “They want to know what’s going on,” Richie said.
In Vista, an army of 60 teachers meet weekly to plan for lessons collaboratively. After the lessons are taught, they assemble again for arm-chair quarterbacking on what went well, or didn’t.
The hope, said Ritchie, is to have those teachers share that knowledge at their own schools and evangelize the new approach toward instruction.
“This is cutting edge,” said Cindy Anderson, the provost at the Vista Innovation and Design Academy. “It’s all about finding the glitches in what we’re teaching at this point, so we can understand fully NGSS and help other districts understand how it works.”
