OpenSciEd curriculum and professional learning experiences create classrooms with inspired educators and motivated learners. One classroom at a time, OpenSciEd is proving that when given the opportunity to experience high quality curriculum, all students can excel in science.
An OpenSciEd Classroom in Iowa
Davis County Middle School in Bloomfield, Iowa embraces OpenSciEd’s phenomena-based learning which inspires students to lead in questioning, investigating, and solving problems. Through student-lead discovery, this OpenSciEd classroom fosters a classroom culture where everyone matters and is heard.
At each step, students make progress on the classroom’s questions through science and engineering practices to figure out a piece of a science idea. Each piece they figure out adds to the developing explanation, model, or designed solution. Each step may also generate questions that lead to the next step in the storyline.
Together, what students figure out helps explain the unit’s phenomena or solve the problems they have identified. A storyline provides a coherent path toward building science ideas piece by piece, anchored in students’ own questions. This approach highlights two key instructional shifts in the Next Generation Science Standards that are typically absent from traditional science instruction: phenomena-based teaching and the importance of coherence, thanks to our to science technology tools for the classroom.