The Need to Align Teaching with Next Generation Science Standards

The Corporation’s Jim Short assesses progress toward curriculum-based professional learning designed to enable teachers to implement new instructional materials

By Carnegie Corporation of New York October 29, 2021

Professional Learning for Educators

“Putting curriculum reforms into practice is a difficult and demanding process that requires a vision of reform, flexibility and support for change, collaboration among teachers to learn, and leadership at different levels to be coherent,” writes Jim Short, an Education program director at Carnegie Corporation of New York, in a special issue of the Journal of Science Teacher Education dedicated to Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

In the article, Short describes the need for curriculum-based professional learning to improve teacher practice aligned with NGSS. With support from the Corporation, the National Research Council at the National Academy of Sciences developed A Framework for K-12 Science Education (2012), which established a foundation on which new science standards could be developed. This resulted in The Next Generation Science Standards: For States, by States (2013), published with support from the Corporation along with a broad-based network of organizations that collaborated to build state and local support for the adoption of new policies based on the Framework and the NGSS. Currently, 20 states plus the District of Columbia have adopted the NGSS as their policies for state science standards and 24 additional states have adopted new policies and science standards that were influenced by the Framework and the NGSS.

“With the purposes and policies for science curriculum reform established, the current focus moved to designing curriculum and professional learning programs that can support the shifts in teachers’ practices required by new standards,” writes Short.

The Corporation has taken a number of steps to support this shift, including funding the establishment of OpenSciEd (also featured in the journal's special issue), a collaboration that brings together states, curriculum developers, national science education leaders, and experts to create research-based, openly licensed K–12 science instructional materials aligned with NGSS — available to any science teacher anywhere at no cost. In 2020, Short coauthored the report The Elements: Transforming Teaching through Curriculum-Based Professional Learning that identifies a core set of actions, approaches, and enabling conditions that effective schools and systems have put in place to reinforce and amplify the power of high-quality curriculum and skillful teaching.

“Better science instructional materials and curriculum-based professional learning programs are needed,” writes Short. “While the purposes and policies supporting science education in our country have changed at scale, we are far from having compelling evidence that the curriculum materials used in courses guiding K–12 science instruction and the professional learning opportunities needed to support instruction are scaling-up.”

To learn more about what needs to be done to align teachers’ practices to NGSS, read Short’s full article Making Progress on Curriculum Reform in Science Education through Purposes, Policies, Programs, and Practices.