Science PTA Meeting

Last Monday the focus of the Coleytown general PTA meeting was science.  Mr. Pete Alfano, CES Science coach, facilitated an exciting and interactive meeting to help parents learn more about new science curriculum in Westport.  He began by describing the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), a set of K-12 content standards developed to improve science education for all students.  NGSS standards are written in terms of performance expectations.  These performance expectations describe what students should be able to do at the end of a unit of study.  The NGSS standards have three dimensions: Disciplinary Core ideas (content), Cross Cutting Concepts (ex: cause/effect, patterns), and Science and Engineering Practices.  

Mr. Alfano immersed parents into the lab by exploring an anchoring phenomena.  This phenomena will be the basis of the entire unit of study.  All of the work students do in the unit will be designed to explore this phenomena.  

Parents observed the two liter bottles filled with hot water and made observations in their table groups.  The "class" then watched a similar phenomena with a tanker car from a real world video.  They answered two questions: How would you describe what you observed (what was the behavior?) How would you explain what you observed (what caused the behavior?)

Why did the tanker car/bottle collapse?  What caused this?

Parents then created models of what they thought happened with the bottle or tanker car.  

Mr. Alfano told the parents: "We are only just getting started. Don't worry if you are not sure about your ideas. The important thing is not to have the one "right answer" at this point. The goal is to try to represent your initial thinking about what is going on in these phenomena, both for yourself and others. These models will help us get our initial ideas on paper so we as a science community can figure out what parts of our models we agree on, and more important, what questions we have that can guide what we need to investigate."

The posters were placed on the lab tables and parents did a gallery walk of other groups' models.  They noticed similarities and differences between their models and their peers.

Parents then wrote down questions on post it notes based on their gallery walk.  These were questions that they still had regarding the initial phenomena.  Mr. Alfano collected the questions and sorted them on to a driving question board.

Mr. Alfano brought the parents together for their first consensus meeting.  The parents ran the meeting (just as your children do) and discussed their observations about the phenomena.  They debated and came to some initial agreement about what they believed happened with the bottle and the tanker.  

Mr. Alfano then described how teachers use the questions from the driving question board to support students' exploration throughout the rest of the unit.  For example, for this phenomena, the parents had questions related to temperature, pressure, time and material.  All experiments throughout the unit of study would help students explore these four areas.  All of the work would relate back to the original anchoring phenomena.  Students would refine their models multiple times as they learned more throughout the unit.  In each unit of study, students are actively making meaning of the scientific concepts.  Instead of teachers spending time instructing explanations, students are constructing the explanations.

What does this look like at Coleytown?  

A third grade phenomena for a unit on forces and motion-a rollercoaster!

Students exploring the concept of balanced and unbalanced forces.

A Kindergarten field study of plants and animals

Kindergarten experiments in a study of plants

Where can I obtain more information about NGSS standards?  Click here for a helpful tip sheet from NextGenScience.org.

This was a wonderful opportunity for parents to learn more about the science curriculum at Coleytown. Be on the lookout for more blog posts about science at Coleytown!