THE GEOSCIENCES: A NATURAL FIT FOR 3-D LEARNING ENVISIONED BY THE NGSS

The Next Generation Science Standards weave together core ideas, the practices of science and engineering, and cross-cutting concepts in a way that authentically represents the enterprise of science. Implementing the NGSS depends upon a new view of the teacher’s role in the classroom and a vision for how we can teach the immensity of Earth’s systems without overwhelming our students.

Having students engaged with the practices of science, in order to make sense of the world, takes practice and lots of time. Students will need a science teacher who can both (1) lead the way into the unknown, like a principal investigator heading up a scientific project and (2) structure the learning opportunities to engage the students in meaningful and productive work, like a savvy project manager. To do these two things, a teacher will need significant research experience. The geoscience community can be a part of encouraging preservice and in-service teachers to become those mentors, offering examples of how we know what we know in the earth sciences and providing avenues for teachers to gain experience in doing scientific research.

The NGSS for the geosciences are immense. Single performance expectations cover a lot of ideas, consistent with the complex and immense universe those performance expectations are meant to address. Along with its immensity, the NGSS consistently emphasize the interconnectedness of the natural world. This complexity and interconnectedness pose a challenge and an opportunity.

To those not intimately familiar with the discipline, a way to teach these huge ideas may be to show or create diagrams with lots of arrows but omit helping students learn how we figured out the complex interactions. While the complexity presents a significant challenge, it can be an opportunity to showcase a unique strength of the geosciences. For decades, geoscientists have routinely combined disciplines to answer questions about the Earth: geochemists, biogeologists, geophysicists, etc. The geosphere, however, is invisible to non-geoscientists. The geoscience community can support teachers in designing instruction that reveals the geosphere and gives them the tools for helping students make sense of their observations about Earth.