While 15 states and the District of Columbia—along with plenty of individual districts—have adopted and are beginning to implement the Next Generation Science Standards, teachers often say they lack resources to help them bring the new standards to students.
The Teaching Channel, in partnership with Achieve, the group that led the development of the common science standards, has released four new videos of classroom lessons aligned to the science standards.
In the clip below, a high school science teacher from Boone County, Ky., has her students build Rube Goldberg machines to demonstrate energy transfers. “Energy and matter” is one of the seven cross-cutting concepts, or ideas that apply across the science disciplines, that are laid out in the standards. The teacher asks students to make connections between their creations and energy transfers within an ecosystem, as a way of bridging the physical and life sciences.
(The video is also featured on Education Week Teacher, which hosts a library of Teaching Channel material.)
The Next Generation Science Standards have three “dimensions"—cross-cutting concepts, scientific and engineering practices, and disciplinary core ideas—and can seem somewhat more complicated than other standards on paper. The Teaching Channel has other videos explaining those dimensions and the “vision” behind the NGSS here.
Related :