Keith Wright's Blog

This year has forced me to be the most reflective teacher that I have been in a long time. I am one of five chemistry teachers from around the country chosen to participate in BetterLesson’s Master Teacher Project. The goal of the Project is to show that it the NGSS looks like in the classroom. The goal is for me to publish 80 lessons that other teachers can use in their classroom. The lessons have required me to think deeply about my lessons because I am putting my stuff out there. It makes me wonder–how well are my students learning? Is my lesson the best way that I can help students to learn? How effective are my resources? How well does the lesson align to the Mass. Frameworks and the NGSS Practices of the Scientist? There are many components to the lessons, but the thing I have valued most is this act of reflecting. Basically, it comes down to this: how can I take my teaching to the next level. I will post some of my reflections in subsequent posts, but to take a look into my classroom, please check out my BetterLesson webpage.

While it is reportedly unlikely that Massachusetts will adopt NGSS, choosing instead to adapt them, there are some key parts that will likely end up in the next version of the Mass. frameworks.  Key among them are the use of the NGSS Practices of the Scientist as a means for teaching science in the classroom. Our school’s Science Department has been engaged in meaningful discussions about how to teach science while embedding these practices:

1. Asking questions (for science) and defining problems (for engineering)

2. Developing and using models

3. Planning and carrying out investigations

4. Analyzing and interpreting data

5. Using mathematics and computational thinking

6. Constructing explanations (for science) and designing solutions (for engineering)

7. Engaging in argument from evidence

8. Obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information

Going forward, my goal is to evaluate every lesson plan to see how well I am using these practices as a way to teach my students how to do science the way scientists do science.

Noyce Summer Institute Notes

Here are some ideas and rationales that I thought about and discussed with other Noyce Master Teaching Fellows and professors at UMASS on May 2 and 3.

Idea: What does our school do to help parents navigate social services? How can we identify families that need this help? This could be an amazing Senior Expedition or senior crew service project!

Rationale: This would make school even more of an ally than it already is for our families, and possibly increase the quality of life for our students’ families

Idea: Teaching and Reading Chapters 8 & 9 from Paul Gorski’s Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty: Strategies for Erasing the Opportunity Gap.

Rationale: Ch. 8 discusses the benefits of the list below. It provides the research-based justification for why our school is focused on them. Chapter 9 zeroes in on how to work with rather than on, poor and working class people

• incorporating arts across the curriculum
• having high expectations for all students
• the importance of rigorous student-centered pedagogy
• making curricula relevant to students’ lives
• teaching about class and race bias, and analyzing curricula for these
• promoting literacy enjoyment

Chapter 9 asks that educators make four commitments to our work

1. Choose a resiliency view, rather than a deficit view, of poor and working class people, focusing on student and family assets
2. Engage families
3. Build relationships with students
4. Ensure that opportunities for family involvement are accessible to poor and working class families

And that was just Friday morning. In the afternoon we participated in a poverty simulation, in which a groups of people were divided into families, given a scenario typical of a family living in poverty, and then told to do what we could to pay the bills, hold our family together, and just generally struggle like the 46 million people living in poverty in this country (about 1 in 6 people, the highest proportion since the 1930’s) do every day. I’d be happy to talk with you about it, but for now let me just say that it gave me great pause and I will be reflecting on it for a good while.