The AMNH course The Dynamic Earth: A Course for Educators provides students with an overview of the origin and evolution of the Earth. Informed by the recently released Next Generation Science Standards, this course examines geological time scales, radiometric dating, and how scientists “read the rocks.” We will explore dramatic changes in the Earth over the last 4 billion years, including how the evolution of life on Earth has affected its atmosphere. In addition to looking at geology on a global scale, participants will take to their own backyards to explore and share their local geologic history. Course participants will bring their understanding of the dynamic Earth - along with content resources, discussion questions, and assignments - into their own teaching.
Teaching with the Next Generation Science Standards: Part 1
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En provenance du cours de American Museum of Natural History
The Dynamic Earth: A Course for Educators
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À partir de la leçon
Evolution of the Atmosphere
You will learn how the evolution of photosynthetic life changed the concentration of oxygen in the oceans and atmosphere, and how this is reflected in the rock record. You will also become familiar with how the Next Generation Science Standards connect to this week’s content. Finally, you will complete a written assignment: an analysis of a local geologic feature.
Rencontrer les enseignants
Edmond Mathez, Ph.D.Curator and Professor
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Ro Kinzler, Ph.D.Senior Director
Science Education
So today we're going to talk about teaching
and learning science with the next generation science standards.
And in particular, we're going to focus on how you can use course resources from
this week to help your students meet
the performance expectations of these new standards.
The approach of this lecture is that we're going to
talk a little bit about the principles of learning science.
How do students learn science in the classroom well.
We'll talk a little bit about the
framework for the next generation science standards, and then actually
we're going to go visit the next generation science standards website.
And explore in detail how the performance expectations are presented.
Let's start by thinking about how do students learn science in the classroom.
The National Research Council laid some very important foundational work in 2000
that really explored the research about, how do people learn?
And tried to bring this research to bear on the ways
that we think about how we teach people different kinds of content.
And what they ser, what they identified was
that there were three important principles that we
have to keep in mind when we thinking
about how students learn science in the classroom.
One, you know very well as teachers which
is that you have to engage prior knowledge.
Your students come into the classroom with preconceptions about
whatever it is you're going to be teaching them.
They're not empty vessels.
So you need to be able to
think about your, planning your learning to surface
their prior knowledge, surface
their preconceptions, identify possible misconceptions,
and then plan your teaching and instruction to help
address and help them deepen those, their conceptual understanding.
So that you know already, in addition it's important that
we help our students reflect on their learning as they learn.
Because students need to be able to become independent learners,
they have to be able to be conscious of how
to monitor their learning.
Finally, we have this idea that we need to
help our students develop competence in an area of interest.
So whether you're teaching history or science or math.
Basically, this is the discipline-specific aspect of these principles.
And to learn it well, we have to
help them develop competence in that area of interest.
To develop competency in an area of inquiry, students need three things.
They need to
have a deep foundation of factual knowledge.
They need to understand the facts and ideas
in the context of a conceptual frame work.
And then they have to be able to
organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application.
So now we're going to take a look at the next generation
science standards that were released by the National Research Council in 2012.
And what was very interesting about the approach that they took
is they didn't actually just release a set of standards first.
They actually
started by releasing a framework for the new standards.
And that's what we're going to explore, for a few minutes here.
The framework is made up of three dimensions.
So we have the disciplinary core ideas.
Which is the content, if you will, of the standards.
We have the cross cutting concepts.
And then we have the science and engineering practices.
So, what I would like to do is take a moment to explore each
of these dimensions because they actually are
really significant in defining the space if
you will within which the new performance
expectations, which are the actual standards are, articulated.
So the first dimension I want to focus is the Practices.
Very importantly, the National Research Council recognized that
we have to make more clear the actual
ways in which scientists and engineers do their work.
What are the practices that they engage in
as they do sciences, as they do engineering?
And they articulated these practices in a set of eight.
And I think that these practices will make sense to you,
in terms of when you think about what do scientists do.
Well they ask questions, obviously. They plan and carry out investigations.
They analyze and interpret the data that they
gather during their investigation.
Of course, they want to construct explanations based on these data, then
they have to engage in argument, because they're going to put forth a hypothesis,
they're going to evaluate it with the data they collected, and then they're
going to have to defend why they think that their interpretation is correct.
And of course, communication is essential in science.
So in addition, you might see some practices here that really
haven't been part of prior descriptions of how scientists do their work.
And here
we identify as an important practice, developing and using models.
This includes conceptual models, thought experiments, physical
simulations where you have physical representations of
phenomena and you, you know, create interactions,
you can observe what happens to computer simulations.
So really making it explicit that model thinking,
is essential in science, is a real strength of
this articulation.
Another strength which is related of
course, is using math and computational thinking.
Math is the language of science, but it's never been necessarily
as explicit, in prior ways of understanding how science is done.
An here it's identified as one of the eight practices.
So, even though the practices are presented as a set of eight, it's
really important than we not see them as a, as a list that provides,
like, a stepwise set of instructions.
That is not at all what the framework is trying
to do in terms of depicting how science is done.
And, in fact.
They present a, figure in the framework, which is a little bit abstract, but I
think it's extremely valuable because this is
basically spheres of activity for science and engineering.
And what we see is that it's extremely
non-linear, that there's three different spheres that are identified.
There's Investigating,
i e gathering data, testing, asking questions.
There's evaluating all the different times
that you're accessing the data you collected.
The interpretations of others and then developing explanations and solutions.
These are three different spheres but
they happen throughout the entire scientific process.
And you can enter into it from many points.
You might be an observationalist.
You might go out into the, into the field and,
and make geologic maps.
You're, you're making observations and you're reflecting them on a map.
Or you might be a theorist.
You might actually come into this process with the idea
that you're going to create models to, that reflect particular theories.
And then you're going to run those models to assess the theory.
All the time you're going to be engaging in critical thinking, in
scientific argument, and analyzing your information so that you can make
progress with the investigation that you're doing.
I know it's kind of a crazy picture, but this is a much stronger representation
of how science is done than what we
might think of as the traditional scientific method.
So it's literally step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4, and then magically you're done.
This reflects much better the complexity of it.
So let's talk about another very important dimension, the crosscutting concepts.
We talked about, this idea around how people
learn that having a conceptual framework is essential,
so if you don't have a conceptual framework
for something, you're going to learn new information that's going to
be a list of facts And you'll try to fit all those facts in your mind,
but then, without a framework, you can't actually
put them anywhere, that you can make sense of.
That means you're going to have a very hard time remembering them and
certainly a hard time retrieving them and applying them to a new
situation, and therefore you really aren't going to be able to learn.
The crosscutting concepts are extremely powerful because
they are the conceptual framework that we
want to begin engaging our students in
since kindergarten right up through 12th grade.
So, we see that they've identified seven and
it's great because it's not actually a huge number.
But these are very
big ideas, and in terms of Earth science we
can think of the crosscutting concepts with many different
examples, and certainly giving examples to your students is
going to be a powerful way for them to understand it.
So if we think about patterns, the fact that we
observe earthquakes and the distribution of earthquakes and volcanoes across the
Earth's surface The pattern that those distributions make are, are set
of information that we use to develop our understanding plate tectonics.
In terms of cause and effect we talk about greenhouse gasses.
The fact that we have greenhouse gasses present in the atmosphere, such as carbon.
And if we increase the amount of greenhouse gasses then
we will increase the warming that is associated with those gases.
That's a good example of cause and effect.
Scale, proportion and quantity, this is a huge concept in earth and space science.
There's nothing bigger that we know of than the scale of the universe.
So,
how do we help our students understand those vast scales spatially?
And also, temporally.
There's nothing older than the universe that we know of.
So, you know.
What does it mean that it's 13.7 billion years?
How do we help our students understand that?
We also have the idea of how do
we represent scale on maps and having students
understand the role of the scale bar when
they're trying to er, interpret a geologic map.
With systems and systems models, it's very
helpful if we can describe for our students
and with our students that the earth is
a system, that it's made up of many
subsystems and all of these sub systems interact together.
So students can use that as an example of systems and systems models.
For energy and matter, a good example there that is very dramatic is hurricanes.
You know the sun heats the Earth unevenly.
You have this concentration of heat at the equator.
That, that energy has to go somewhere.
And what happens
is it, it basically gets transported. It gets evened out.
Transported from the equator towards the poles and a major mechanism for
that is, in fact, hurricanes, which can be a very dramatic example.
Structure and function, we can think of in many different ways.
One good way to think about it is, is with minerals.
The structure and the makeup of minerals is what gives them their properties.
So we can help students try to understand that.
And then finally with stability and change,
this can be a difficult concept for students to pick up.
Often times when students think of stability, they think nothing's happening.
And that's definitely not the case in Earth and space science.
Stability is usually some dynamic interplay between different forces.
So think about a star, for example.
You have the pressure exerted outward by the
fact that the star is burning fuel, fusing hydrogen.
And that's balanced, in fact, by gravitational pull inward,
and that's what makes a star stable.
That's what makes it look like it's not changing in the sky.
But eventually over time the fuel will burn
out, so that outward pressure will go away.
The gravity will win.
The star will collapse and you'll get
a huge explosion potentially depending on the size.
So these are just a few examples of the way that these crosscutting concepts.
Permeate the field of Earth and space science.
So finally, let's talk about the content.
Scientific understanding is a combination of the practice
of science and the factual content of science.
And then it's all linked together by the crosscutting concepts.
Fortunately, they've actually worked hard.
To limit the number of big ideas they've articulated,
that they think are important for students to understand.
Because this is a course about the dynamic Earth system, we're
going to focus in on Earth and space sciences, and what the
National Research Council has done is, they've identified
three big ideas within Earth and space science.
So we have Earth's place in the
universe, Earth systems, and Earth and human activity.
So these three areas encompass the full range of content in Earth and
space sciences that we want to explore with
our students from Kindergarten through 12th grade.
And what's really interesting about how this is
done is that each of these big ideas is
broken up into component ideas, and there's not a huge number of them.
So for Earth, space, and the universe, it's three.
Earth systems is five.
Earth and human activity is four. So we can see that across these three
big ideas within earth and space sciences there's actually a total of 12.
So it's 12 big ideas that we're expecting our students to master from kindergarten
through 12th grade.
And this is a big departure from some prior approaches to
doing standards where it sort of becomes a laundry list of all
the different facts that we want our students to, to master
and memorize and know as they progress from kindergarten through twelfth grade.
So I think this is a really powerful approach for us as educators.
Not only that, but they've chosen the big ideas so that
they are, they link many cross-cutting concepts together, they are relevant
to students' lives, and, and therefore, it makes it easier for us to
plan our instruction, to engage students in
them, and get them excited about learning.
So this is just an introduction really to
the framework for the Next Generation Science Standards.
We encourage you to visit the website, to become more familiar
with the framework itself, as well as the articulated student expectations.
And also, as we work through the different subject
areas in this course, think about the ways
that the resources we're providing to you, any activities,
you can then use them in the classroom to
help your students meet the student, the performance expectations.
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