Ask Matt: Episode 2
In this episode “Turning your classroom upside down”, Matt talks about Asking Questions and Patterns, and how to use these key practices and concepts in the classroom. He also shares his ideas on one of the key instructional shifts that NGSS encourages—flipping the lesson upside down. Eugene and Matt also talk about recent changes in Arctic Sea ice, and why such subjects are perfect companions to an NGSS classroom.
Listen to Episode 2 of ‘Ask Matt’ on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or below:
The transcript of the episode is also provided below.
[Intro music]
Eugene: Hello and welcome to ‘Ask Matt’. I’m Eugene Cordero, professor of meteorology and climate science from San Jose State University, and Founder and Director of Green Ninja. Green Ninja is an educational initiative that helps teachers make science learning meaningful and rewarding for their students through engaging curriculum, where students use science and engineering to solve real world environmental problems.
I’m here with Matthew d’Alessio, geology professor from Cal State Northridge and chief author of the 2016 California Science Framework. Matt has dedicated over 20 years of his life to science education and is a national expert on how to make science learning effective and engaging. Matt was a high school teacher, runs a sustainability education program at a local elementary school, and spent a year as a stay-at-home dad. Matt cares deeply about the environment, and he’s also recently received a Distinguished Teaching Award from Cal State Northridge.
I met Matt about three years ago and he agreed to help our team with advice as we created our own NGSS curriculum here at Green Ninja. Today we are an approved science publisher in California, in large part because of Matt’s guidance and advice. We all learned a lot from our work with Matt, and I thought it would be great to share some of his wisdom and insights with others. So here we are.
I’ll ask Matt questions about a range of subjects from NGSS and science teaching to professional training and science content. And hopefully we’ll all learn something about how to make this transition to NGSS easier and more rewarding for teachers and students.
If you’re listening and have any of your own questions, just send them to info@greenninja.org and I’ll share some of them with Matt in a future episode. So let’s get started. Thanks for joining us today, Matt. How’s your week been?
Matt: Oh, it’s great. It’s a beautiful day here in Southern California.
Eugene: Anything exciting in your week that you’ve been up to?
Matt: Oh, well, my wife is running for LA City Council, so every day is exciting with the debates and all sorts of things going on.
Eugene: Yeah, must be a busy time, and the election is coming pretty soon, right?
Matt: June 4th, so things are starting to happen already.
Eugene: Well, that’s exciting. I thought we’d get started with a question kind of stepping back a little bit. And can you tell us why we needed these new science standards?
Matt: I think there were probably pressures coming from a lot of different directions. Everything from higher ed where we are and us looking at our students and saying they’re just programed to not think, and that’s one part. But you know it parallels the educational research and a realization that the way that we’ve been teaching hasn’t really been in line with the way that students learn. It correlates with some changes to standards that were done in math and English language arts, the common core standards. Those were coming out.
And all of this is basically just as we make our teaching more student centered and more, giving the students the opportunity to really construct their knowledge and build their knowledge themselves. And that’s something that was missing from the previous standards, is that we were teaching them science facts, but we weren’t teaching them to be scientists.
Eugene: And this is really going to help with that, you think?
Matt: That’s the whole point, is that trying to look at those three dimensions of NGSS are about. You know what scientists do with their practices and how they think about things as well as the background knowledge that they know. Those are those three dimensions.
Eugene: Yeah, that’s great. And hopefully, over the next few years, we’ll start to see evidence of that even at the university where students are getting this practice. We should-- How long will it take before we start to see this-- do you think-- this filter through all the way up to the university?
Matt: I wish I had a good estimate of that. It’s going to vary a lot based upon where people are and what regions they’re in and what’s going on. It’s going to take a while before everybody really gets a hold of all this. And that’s partly because our teachers are all trying to get a hold of it. I’m trying to get a hold of this as one of the people that’s supposed to be-- I’m on here as the expert, but really I’m learning about how to do this better every day.
Eugene: So it is a progress, a progression. So I know we touched upon this last time a bit, but can you tell us why California has a different version of NGSS compared to the national one?
Matt: Well, our NGSS standards I should say that we-- those are exactly the same as the national NGSS standards. We’ve added, I think, seven clarification statements somewhere, some tiny little things just to clarify what the performance expectations are. So those parts are the same. It’s what we, California, has done in addition to NGSS that makes it the California NGSS and that’s our environmental principles and concepts, a whole bunch of legislation that governs different things that we have to do.
It basically it-- you know-- the answer, the literal answer to your question of why we have a different version is because the legislature has mandated it. It all has to do with things that California is very concerned about. California is trying to be an environmental leader, and so we have mandated at the legislative level that our students need to learn about the environment through the environmental principles and concepts.
We’ve got some mandated learning about different diseases. There’s even things about organ and tissue donation that are required by law because that’s a really important public health thing and putting that in the science part of the class is just-- makes sense so that our students understand that. So those are all things that are-- each one is in there for a particular reason because it’s a priority for California.
Eugene: But basically the general intention of the national standards is pretty similar to what we see in California.
Matt: That’s right. Yeah, we still have and then-- you know-- a test that’s done for California. With the test, the performance expectations and NGSS should be able to be used by anybody else, anywhere else. We’ve just got a few extra things in there.
Eugene: So kind of following up with that, in California for middle school, there seems to be two different models of instruction for science. Can you explain the difference between, like, this discipline specific and integrated, and the pros and cons of either of those?
Matt: Yeah, there’s a whole history behind those in terms of how those came about. Of course, the discipline specific model looks a lot more like the way that education has been going for a lot of years. It looks like the previous standards. It looks like a lot of what university classrooms used to be looking like.
But now if you look at things-- my alma mater-- when we look at what is required for the different majors-- I was a geology major and now in geology, a geology major must take a class in geophysics, a class in geochemistry, a class in geobiology. There’s some-- these aren’t necessarily called these exact things, but essentially our discipline consist of all these subthings. This happens in the cutting edge schools that are doing with biology. There’s no longer only pure biology. There’s biology that includes biochemistry, biology that includes biophysics. And that-- basically we’re starting to see this, that the problem that people are addressing and trying to solve in science today are crossing disciplinary boundaries, and so there was the goal to try to teach science that way is to-- and that’s where the integrated model came in. It’s starting with real problems and figuring out what science you need to bring in to solve them and whatever disciplinary boundaries you need to cross-- no problem. And that’s what the integrated model is about.
There was quite honestly a little bit of pushback to that. People didn’t feel comfortable with that and a lot of teachers didn’t feel like they could cross those boundaries, and so the state put the discipline specific model back in the mix. And if you remember correctly, we have the preferred integrated model because the science educators and the scientists prefer it. But the discipline specific model is there for, essentially, to make sure that the teachers feel comfortable with it, and that’s an important thing too. We need our teachers to feel like they can do this well. And a lot of the shifts that are involved in NGSS have nothing to do with whether you choose a discipline specific or an integrated model. You can still do many of those shifts very well in either of the models.
Eugene: But you call in California, it’s called the preferred model. So it’s preferred because…
Matt: It’s preferred because literally this is preparing us for the future and the way things are moving. Now I know a lot of our listeners that have come through a university said, “Wait, Professor d’Alessio, you’re in a geology department!” And that’s geology. That’s one silo.
But like I said, we’re starting to see that a lot of the institutions are changing. In fact, there actually are no longer any geology departments anywhere in the University of California system. They have now shifted their names to be Earth and Planetary, Earth and Environmental, Earth and Space Science. Trying to basically start recognizing that the silos are starting to break down and that’s happening more at the cutting edge-- the Stanfords, the Harvards, even the Berkeleys of things-- and hasn’t quite filtered down to my CSU institution just yet, but I assure you, those things are happening.
Eugene: Yeah, that is an interesting shift to see. I have heard some districts suggest that one of the reasons they like the discipline specific model is that that’s what students are going to get when they go to high school. Do you have any comment about that?
Matt: Well, in California, we also have two models that were presented to high schools as options and in high school. So there’s a little bit more flexibility than there was in the middle school, so you can’t quite guarantee what’s going on. But the two options in high school are a discipline specific model or a model that involves Earth and space science being embedded throughout some of the other courses, like a class includes Earth science and life science called Living Earth, a course that’s Earth science and chemistry called Chemistry in the Earth System, and your physics and Earth science is called Physics of the Universe.
And so, we’re seeing those integrations happening on a little bit smaller scale within those high school classes, and now, about two thirds of districts in the state of California are opting for this integration of Earth science. So that’s happening very much in the high school level, as it is in the middle school level.
Eugene: Oh, that’s interesting. And do you have any sense for-- in terms of middle school, have you heard any numbers about what percentage are using the discipline specific versus the integrated model?
Matt: I should remember, but I don’t remember right now. So next podcast we’ll look that up for everybody.
Eugene: Oh okay, we’ll check that out. You know, one of the things that when you look through the science framework that you helped write, that an important part of NGSS is a shift in instruction that teachers are asked to make. And of course, this is really the core piece of what’s going to happen in the classroom. I think we discussed before about maybe there being three kind of key areas, but I think there’s a whole bunch of different elements, and I hope over the next few episodes, we can talk about some of these.
But I mean, do you want to start with one-- like when you talk to teachers and ask, “What’s going to be different in my classroom?”-- one of these instructional shifts that the teachers are going to encounter will be encouraged to start to implement?
Matt: Yeah. One of the most common things that I see happening when people are designing lessons and teaching them about how we approach them within NGSS is that they start realizing that there are lessons to fix them-- or not to fix them-- but to make them more NGSS-like, they ended up flipping their lessons upside down. What I mean by that is that we used to often start by telling our students a bunch of science and then we might have them look in nature for evidence of that, or to verify that everything that we told them about the way the world works is actually true. And that’s great if you know how the world works, then this is a very efficient process. But it doesn’t necessarily create the scientists that we want that can discover new things.
And so, we flipped things upside down in NGSS, where we start with a mystery. Every lesson starts with a phenomenon or, like I said, I call it a mystery oftentimes, something we’re trying to figure out and our students are trying to discover things. And so we start with the unknown and the real world situation, and then try and from that, kind of reconstruct a lot of science. And this is, of course, a little bit slower because you’re trying to reinvent hundreds of years of scientific progress within your classroom, and sometimes you short circuit that process a little bit to make it go a little bit faster because we have learned things. But the essence is really trying to get your students to discover the things just like the original professional scientists did.
Eugene: Yeah. Gosh, I really remember having these discussions a few years ago with you about that as well. Now, is there an example you can give us kind of thinking about, like, how we would teach a particular-- how we might have traditionally taught a particular topic and what that might look like with this flipping things upside down?
Matt: Sure. In a chemical reaction, for example, we often would start by telling people that there are two types of chemical reactions. There’s an endothermic reaction and exothermic reaction. And then we’d go into the lab and we’d mix things up and we’d see, “Oh, this one’s endothermic, this one’s exothermic.” And we’d label them based upon key terminology that we had been introduced to in the lecture.
Change that around a little bit, flip it upside down. We’re going to start with mixing together a bunch of random stuff and trying to start to look for patterns and saying, “Oh, gosh, some of these things seem to be heating up and some of them seem to be cooling down. Maybe we need to come up with some sort of word to describe those differences.” And so we basically come up with a label, and at that point, we might want to introduce the scientific label of endothermic and exothermic. Or we could just say heating up reactions and cooling down reactions, and we can eventually add the labels in once we’ve had a chance to really explore those patterns and define them a little bit more. So that would be an example of how we’ve flipped things completely.
Eugene: And I like how you invoke this word ‘patterns’ too, which is, you know, obviously a crosscutting concept that are one of the tools that we use to study that phenomenon.
Matt: Yeah, and that’s really even, you know, it’s-- in the middle school level you’re doing that, at the high school level you’re doing that, and at the elementary school, you’re always, always looking for patterns and trying to discover things from those patterns.
Eugene: So, last time we talked a little bit about this three-dimensional core piece of NGSS. We talked about the science and engineering practices and crosscutting concepts, and I thought we could go through some of these so we could get some of your ideas on how to use these in our teaching. So let’s start with one of the science and engineering practices, which is asking questions and defining problems. Matt, what can you tell us about this particular science and engineering practice?
Matt: Well, the first thing is that-- remember that all of these practices are things we want our students to be doing and we want them to develop skills in them. So who’s asking the questions? It’s the students. And that’s a big shift in many ways, as we’ve been thinking and learning in our teacher education programs about how to ask really good questions of our students. And that’s-- we’ve got a lot of training in that.
Now we need to shift things around a little bit and have them ask questions, and the first thing I can tell you from lots of personal experience and a fair amount of research on this is that students don’t ask questions, unless they’re given a specific curricular space for it, meaning you need to give them time to ask questions and you need to expect them to ask questions. Especially by the time they get to middle school, high school, and college, they’ve been told to hold their questions, stop asking them because it slows things down too much.
And so we need to release them back into that process, which again requires giving them some time to do it. And then spending some time looking at the questions that they do come up with and comparing different questions to try and see, “Hmm, are some of these questions more scientifically useful or scientifically productive?” Like, if we answered this question, would we learn more than if we answered that question? And looking at different sort of types of questions, so we can kind of push our questioning to the next level.
Eugene: Yeah, that’s a great point, and also this idea that if students asked questions, it might be slower. How do you help teachers kind of grapple with, you know, I have all this material I have to get through, and yet, you know, when we flip things upside down and when we’re invoking questions from students, it takes time-- what suggestions would you give for teachers?
Matt: Well, with question asking in particular, I find the question asking to be a really useful assessment tool. I have my students actually ask questions at the end of every class period. And so, it’s a-- by based upon the questions that they ask and the types of knowledge that they express in those questions, I can learn what they’ve gotten out of that day. And so, in some senses by doing that-- by giving them this carved out curricular time for questions, I’m also accomplishing a lot of the other things I need to do in my classroom, like figuring out my formative assessment and figuring out what people know and that’s part of it.
But again, the other thing that we talked about last time was just that this is one of the objectives of science classes is to get our students to ask better questions. And so, we have to devote time to it, just like we have to devote time to the-- covering all of the disciplinary core ideas. We need to devote time to this because this is part of our goal.
Eugene: Yeah, great. And in terms of-- kind of following along with that, you know, there is a progression and it’s in your framework and the California framework, I think, in one of the appendices about-- for example, asking questions and what it looks like as for kindergarten and, you know, the lower grades, all the way to high school. Can you kind of take us through that a little bit, just so we kind of understand, like, if you’re a middle school teacher or if you’re a fifth grade teacher, what those kind of questions are supposed to be like?
Matt: Sure, and actually Appendix One of the front of the California framework, which has all those progressions, and it is a super useful tool. I used it a lot when I was designing curriculum, but also in terms of professional development, it’s been really useful for me to show to teachers because it really helps clarify. It’s like-- it’s kind of like a rubric, like, at my grade level, what is the-- what is this supposed to look like, and how does that compare to a lower grade level?
So with asking questions, we start off in the early elementary grades with doing what kids do naturally as they’re looking at the world around them and they’re being curious and they’re just making observations and asking questions about what they see. So that’s the earliest level.
We want to by the time they get to upper elementary, I want them asking some “What if” questions and trying to think about testable versus non-testable questions, and could they actually come up, you know-- which of these questions could they actually hope to answer by doing some sort of direct observations?
By the time we get to middle school and high school, we’re starting to encourage our students and cultivate the skills of asking questions about more abstract things, not just asking about what you see, but asking about things like data, asking questions about what patterns you see in the data, asking questions about models, like, “How does this component of the model interact with that component?” And asking questions about arguments, like, “I don’t know if you have enough evidence in this here. So can you tell me more about how this reasoning ties to that evidence?” And so really, coming up with more abstract things.
And so, we’re trying to bring our students along, getting them to ask better questions or-- that has to be done at a different way for elementary kids, who are very concrete, versus the high school students, where we’re focusing on questions about different types of things.
Eugene: Yeah, that’s a great point. And kind of following up then, in terms of going over to the one of the crosscutting concepts-- and I wanted to take time to talk about a science and engineering practice but also a crosscutting concept-- and the first one on my list that I see in the Appendix is about patterns, and could you kind of take us through them-- the idea of patterns and the progression that it goes from K to 12 as well?
Matt: Yeah. You’re going to see a pattern here-- a general idea of all of these is that they start off pretty concrete in the elementary level and get more and more abstract. So with the patterns, we start off in the elementary just observing, observing patterns, noticing them. By the time we get to upper elementary, we’re starting to ask our students to classify and break things up into different groups based upon the patterns.
By the time we get to middle school, again, it’s a little bit more abstract. We want to see patterns, not just in the real world, but patterns in data. Also looking here at a different type of not just-- thing-- two things that you can see side by side, but looking at how things change over time a little bit more. That’s a little bit more abstract to be able to think about how things used to look versus how they look now, and so looking at rates of change, trends, those sorts of things.
And then by the time we get to high school, we get much more sophisticated. We’re starting to look at the overlap between patterns and scale, meaning that there are different patterns that are operating at different scales and we’ll-- we can talk about this a little bit later maybe. But when you see a pattern-- when you’re looking from far away, it might look very different than when you’re looking at it much closer. So the macroscopic and the microscopic would be one example of where you’re seeing different patterns that those two different scales and how did those relate to each other-- how does pattern at one scale cause a pattern at a different scale? So that’s very, very high advanced high school stuff.
Eugene: Yeah. And, you know, for a teacher who’s just starting NGSS, let’s say in middle school right now, when you look at their progression, you might read that, “Oh, students have done from K to 5, you know, they-- they built this thing up and now this is where they should be in middle school.” But if they haven’t had the benefit of those students that are coming in of doing any NGSS or if there’s not as much science being taught in elementary school, what kind of work as a teacher have to do to get their students up to these levels so that they’re, you know, by the end of middle school, at the level of asking questions and identifying patterns?
Matt: Well, they’re going to be looking to the progressions and trying to start by, you know, whenever this kids’ are at the time, they need to figure out, “Okay, our students are not really-- if they’re still very concrete and they’re-- and they’re noticing a pattern, then we’ll look at our phenomena from a very concrete perspective and see if we can just push them a little bit further along on that continuum and-- and that’s the only way we can do it.” You can’t-- you can’t short circuit it basically and just start with the-- the advanced stuff without having some of the foundations.
Eugene: Yeah. So I wanted to shift to kind of our kind of second section, which is about climate and the environment. And we’ll review here some of the latest news in this area and talk about how to bring topics-- these kinds of environmental topics-- into our schools and into our classrooms.
So Matt, I don’t know if you had a chance to look at the recent Arctic sea ice data, but right now, we’re, you know, into the spring period, so sea ice is starting to extend again. But the data is showing-- and you can go to the National Sea Ice Center-- but it’s showing that the Arctic sea ice extent is very, very low, lowest on record right now. And this happens to be something that I look at periodic. I’m just kind of curious to see where the Arctic sea ice is at. Have you-- have you had a chance to look at it at all?
Matt: I have-- I was shocked when I saw what-- what things are looking like and I am not a sea ice aficionado like you, I’m afraid. It’s not something I’ve looked at very often, but wow, it’s definitely much-- we’re way below average.
Eugene: Yeah, and as someone who looks at-- I look at it more often, sometimes we’re really below average and then we’ll get a big storm or something will happen and it will pause, and so it’s quite a dynamic environment.
But I’m curious and from your perspective, what suggestions you might have for teachers in kind of bringing features like phenomenon like this that are happening right now-- real time data-- to promote interest in the environment or climate change. Do you have any experience with or have seen good examples of teachers using some real time data in their classrooms?
Matt: Well, students-- they love being up to date and modern, seeing what’s going on. I can see news stories related to what they’re learning about and that just makes everything seem more real. And remember, we’re trying to provide this more authentic science experience-- we’re trying to discover things. And the other thing is trying to figure out. Okay, so you are an Arctic sea ice aficionado. So Eugene, do you know why we have such a low sea ice right now? What is it exactly that’s going on that’s causing this specific year to be so much lower than the other ones? I’m asking.
Eugene: Uhh, no. [laughs] You know, it’s complicated. There’s a lot of different factors going on.
Matt: Yeah, and so I think that part of things is something that teachers might be afraid of. And also that makes it so much more powerful is because here we are, we have a real mystery. And I think that some people might have some good ideas. Maybe our sea ice experts might have some good answers for that. But even then, they might not have all of the answers and you can see that when you actually look at real data. You can actually come up with these phenomena, these mysteries. And so, that’s what the power of real time data often gives us is not just it’s the wow factor of this is actually happening, but also it means that, because it’s happening now, we may not have a good answer for it and that’s science.
Eugene: You know, last week I was talking to a teacher who has been trained in NGSS and said to me, “I’m very comfortable telling students, ‘I don’t know.’” And in fact, it made the student, this teacher, comfortable in the science classroom because there’s, you know, like you said, when you look at real data like that, or we don’t know every field of science perfectly, and he thought that the students really appreciated that and found it really engaging that, “Oh, the teacher doesn’t know. But the teacher says, ‘Hey, let’s try to figure it out.’ Let’s try to make some progress in this area.” And for this teacher, that was very empowering because it didn’t make them nervous about teaching new topics.
Matt: Yeah, I know and I actually happened to be looking at the sea ice extent graphs here and I’m seeing this-- again, these patterns at different scales. I’m seeing that in this, the wintertime you’ve got more ice and then it starts going less and that makes sense to me. And I can totally understand our seasonal thing, but they’re all these little ups and downs that are happening on a scale of, you know, days to weeks, it looks like. And trying to think about what might be causing those and not knowing too much about things. You know, there’s-- I know that wind patterns change from days to weeks.
And so I’m starting to think, “Okay, maybe the wind has something to do with this. You know, maybe there’s different air masses of different temperatures that are causing things to melt.” And I’m pulling my library of stuff that I know, and I’m looking at this and I’m talking out loud about it and that’s exciting for me as a thinker about this one. But hopefully, our students can start doing some of those things and we can help scaffold them, help them ask those questions like, “Okay, what does-- what does happen on the scale of days to weeks that you know about that might affect the sea ice?” And we can actually really do some real science here.
Eugene: Yeah, and if you go to the National Sea Ice Center, some of their scientists are discussing some of those like, why did we lose a whole bunch of ice in this couple weeks or not? Talk about storms, talk about winds, temperature, all those things you just mentioned. And they try to understand these real time features as well.
Can we talk a little bit about the California EP and C’s? Because that is also part of the California framework that’s a little bit different from the national standards. Can you tell us about them and their connection with the NGSS?
Matt: Well, they really dovetail nicely with the expectations from the NGSS for a couple reasons. The first one is the NGSS-- this emphasis on using the three dimensions to explore phenomenon, the mysteries. Well, there are so many important mysteries in our own backyards, having to do with our environmental problems that I think there’s a fantastic opportunity there to tackle a real important phenomena and not just tabletop phenomena that are in a classroom. So that’s the first part of it. But the other one is if you look at our crosscutting concepts, there’s a couple of them that are, you know, that are very important. There’s our systems, and our energy and matter flow.
And the EP and C’s; there are several of them, and several of them really get out this idea of interconnected system of humans and the natural environment or the-- I guess we’re natural too but-- humans and the non-human part of the environment interacting and having complex interactions and having exchanges of matter. And so, one of the environmental principles and concepts talks about how there’s really no impermeable barriers in the world, like, stuff doesn’t just stay where it is. You can never stay in one place forever. And so, that-- when you’re talking about that from the EP and C’s, we’re talking about pollution. That means that pollution happens and it’s hard to contain. If we have nasty stuff, it’s going to get out there and--
But in terms of-- that’s the EP and C’s part, but the NGSS part is tracking the flow of matter through a system and looking at causes and effects, what’s causing it to flow through that system. And so, you really can see this dovetailing really nicely of the NGSS and the EP and C’s. And then one more place they overlap really nicely is especially within our Earth and space science disciplinary core ideas. They’ve divided up NGSS into three-- for Earth and space science-- into three parts. One is kind of about Earth’s history and others about Earth systems, but the third is about human impacts on the Earth. And that’s understanding core ideas about human impacts on the Earth is actually a key part of the DCI’s within NGSS. And I think that all those human impacts are really what the EP and C’s are all about, really sort of putting some framework around those interactions between humans and the non-human parts.
Eugene: Yeah, they do seem to fit in pretty well together as you explained. Let’s go to the final part of our talk today and that’s about burritos. [Matt laughs] So early on, Matt and I discovered that one of the things we have in common is a love for burritos. And although it may be surprising, the subject of burritos isn’t so far away from science education and the environment. So let’s talk burrito. Matt, do your kids like burritos as well?
Matt: They do. They eat them different ways. Jonah tends to like to get a burrito, but then dump it all out onto his plate, and then [Eugene laughs] eat the insides and the tortillas separately.
Eugene: And do you have any suggestions for parents on what great ingredients would kids find fun or they enjoy having in their burritos?
Matt: Oh, all of my kids love beans. This is a-- and then eating them with their fingers when they’re little, and so, beans are a big hit. [laughs]
Eugene: Yeah, and those are whole beans, refried beans?
Matt: We usually do whole beans in our family. That’s because they’re quick and easy to cook and healthy and delicious.
Eugene: So I think beans or something-- that when I lived in Australia-- you know, Australians didn’t have a lot of beans as much, and being Mexican American myself, I was-- I grew up with beans, and I couldn’t find them as much in Australia and-- but there’s-- they’re starting to come. I think that’s a nice staple. Relatedly, have you had the opportunity to use any food topics in any of your own teaching before or do you see, like, how food can be used in an NGSS classroom to some advantage?
Matt: Oh, we talked a lot about-- a lot about food in my physical science class for future teachers. We talked about-- we start the year off actually doing food calorimetry and looking at what it means to have, you know, to have calories and to process the food in your body and what’s going on there and how we’re getting the energy out. And so we, you know, we basically use that as a theme that runs through the entire semester and we don’t really understand the whole thing until we get to the end of the semester when we talk about chemical reactions and things. But it’s the whole semester long that’s based upon that first two days, and of course, my students love getting to burn things on the first day of class. Most professors-- their syllabus-- they go over their syllabus on the first day and then say bye. And in our class, we’re burning things on day one, so. [laughs]
Eugene: Gosh, I want to sign up. [Matt laughs] Well, I think that’s a good place to wrap up. Thanks for joining us, Matt, where we explore NGSS, science education, and the environment with education expert and nice guy, Matt d’Alessio. Thanks for joining us today, Matt, and we’ll see you next time!
Matt: Alright, see you later, Eugene!
[Outro music]
Eugene: Hello and welcome to ‘Ask Matt’. I’m Eugene Cordero, professor of meteorology and climate science from San Jose State University, and Founder and Director of Green Ninja. Green Ninja is an educational initiative that helps teachers make science learning meaningful and rewarding for their students through engaging curriculum, where students use science and engineering to solve real world environmental problems.
I’m here with Matthew d’Alessio, geology professor from Cal State Northridge and chief author of the 2016 California Science Framework. Matt has dedicated over 20 years of his life to science education and is a national expert on how to make science learning effective and engaging. Matt was a high school teacher, runs a sustainability education program at a local elementary school, and spent a year as a stay-at-home dad. Matt cares deeply about the environment, and he’s also recently received a Distinguished Teaching Award from Cal State Northridge.
I met Matt about three years ago and he agreed to help our team with advice as we created our own NGSS curriculum here at Green Ninja. Today we are an approved science publisher in California, in large part because of Matt’s guidance and advice. We all learned a lot from our work with Matt, and I thought it would be great to share some of his wisdom and insights with others. So here we are.
I’ll ask Matt questions about a range of subjects from NGSS and science teaching to professional training and science content. And hopefully we’ll all learn something about how to make this transition to NGSS easier and more rewarding for teachers and students.
If you’re listening and have any of your own questions, just send them to info@greenninja.org and I’ll share some of them with Matt in a future episode. So let’s get started. Thanks for joining us today, Matt. How’s your week been?
Matt: Oh, it’s great. It’s a beautiful day here in Southern California.
Eugene: Anything exciting in your week that you’ve been up to?
Matt: Oh, well, my wife is running for LA City Council, so every day is exciting with the debates and all sorts of things going on.
Eugene: Yeah, must be a busy time, and the election is coming pretty soon, right?
Matt: June 4th, so things are starting to happen already.
Eugene: Well, that’s exciting. I thought we’d get started with a question kind of stepping back a little bit. And can you tell us why we needed these new science standards?
Matt: I think there were probably pressures coming from a lot of different directions. Everything from higher ed where we are and us looking at our students and saying they’re just programed to not think, and that’s one part. But you know it parallels the educational research and a realization that the way that we’ve been teaching hasn’t really been in line with the way that students learn. It correlates with some changes to standards that were done in math and English language arts, the common core standards. Those were coming out.
And all of this is basically just as we make our teaching more student centered and more, giving the students the opportunity to really construct their knowledge and build their knowledge themselves. And that’s something that was missing from the previous standards, is that we were teaching them science facts, but we weren’t teaching them to be scientists.
Eugene: And this is really going to help with that, you think?
Matt: That’s the whole point, is that trying to look at those three dimensions of NGSS are about. You know what scientists do with their practices and how they think about things as well as the background knowledge that they know. Those are those three dimensions.
Eugene: Yeah, that’s great. And hopefully, over the next few years, we’ll start to see evidence of that even at the university where students are getting this practice. We should-- How long will it take before we start to see this-- do you think-- this filter through all the way up to the university?
Matt: I wish I had a good estimate of that. It’s going to vary a lot based upon where people are and what regions they’re in and what’s going on. It’s going to take a while before everybody really gets a hold of all this. And that’s partly because our teachers are all trying to get a hold of it. I’m trying to get a hold of this as one of the people that’s supposed to be-- I’m on here as the expert, but really I’m learning about how to do this better every day.
Eugene: So it is a progress, a progression. So I know we touched upon this last time a bit, but can you tell us why California has a different version of NGSS compared to the national one?
Matt: Well, our NGSS standards I should say that we-- those are exactly the same as the national NGSS standards. We’ve added, I think, seven clarification statements somewhere, some tiny little things just to clarify what the performance expectations are. So those parts are the same. It’s what we, California, has done in addition to NGSS that makes it the California NGSS and that’s our environmental principles and concepts, a whole bunch of legislation that governs different things that we have to do.
It basically it-- you know-- the answer, the literal answer to your question of why we have a different version is because the legislature has mandated it. It all has to do with things that California is very concerned about. California is trying to be an environmental leader, and so we have mandated at the legislative level that our students need to learn about the environment through the environmental principles and concepts.
We’ve got some mandated learning about different diseases. There’s even things about organ and tissue donation that are required by law because that’s a really important public health thing and putting that in the science part of the class is just-- makes sense so that our students understand that. So those are all things that are-- each one is in there for a particular reason because it’s a priority for California.
Eugene: But basically the general intention of the national standards is pretty similar to what we see in California.
Matt: That’s right. Yeah, we still have and then-- you know-- a test that’s done for California. With the test, the performance expectations and NGSS should be able to be used by anybody else, anywhere else. We’ve just got a few extra things in there.
Eugene: So kind of following up with that, in California for middle school, there seems to be two different models of instruction for science. Can you explain the difference between, like, this discipline specific and integrated, and the pros and cons of either of those?
Matt: Yeah, there’s a whole history behind those in terms of how those came about. Of course, the discipline specific model looks a lot more like the way that education has been going for a lot of years. It looks like the previous standards. It looks like a lot of what university classrooms used to be looking like.
But now if you look at things-- my alma mater-- when we look at what is required for the different majors-- I was a geology major and now in geology, a geology major must take a class in geophysics, a class in geochemistry, a class in geobiology. There’s some-- these aren’t necessarily called these exact things, but essentially our discipline consist of all these subthings. This happens in the cutting edge schools that are doing with biology. There’s no longer only pure biology. There’s biology that includes biochemistry, biology that includes biophysics. And that-- basically we’re starting to see this, that the problem that people are addressing and trying to solve in science today are crossing disciplinary boundaries, and so there was the goal to try to teach science that way is to-- and that’s where the integrated model came in. It’s starting with real problems and figuring out what science you need to bring in to solve them and whatever disciplinary boundaries you need to cross-- no problem. And that’s what the integrated model is about.
There was quite honestly a little bit of pushback to that. People didn’t feel comfortable with that and a lot of teachers didn’t feel like they could cross those boundaries, and so the state put the discipline specific model back in the mix. And if you remember correctly, we have the preferred integrated model because the science educators and the scientists prefer it. But the discipline specific model is there for, essentially, to make sure that the teachers feel comfortable with it, and that’s an important thing too. We need our teachers to feel like they can do this well. And a lot of the shifts that are involved in NGSS have nothing to do with whether you choose a discipline specific or an integrated model. You can still do many of those shifts very well in either of the models.
Eugene: But you call in California, it’s called the preferred model. So it’s preferred because…
Matt: It’s preferred because literally this is preparing us for the future and the way things are moving. Now I know a lot of our listeners that have come through a university said, “Wait, Professor d’Alessio, you’re in a geology department!” And that’s geology. That’s one silo.
But like I said, we’re starting to see that a lot of the institutions are changing. In fact, there actually are no longer any geology departments anywhere in the University of California system. They have now shifted their names to be Earth and Planetary, Earth and Environmental, Earth and Space Science. Trying to basically start recognizing that the silos are starting to break down and that’s happening more at the cutting edge-- the Stanfords, the Harvards, even the Berkeleys of things-- and hasn’t quite filtered down to my CSU institution just yet, but I assure you, those things are happening.
Eugene: Yeah, that is an interesting shift to see. I have heard some districts suggest that one of the reasons they like the discipline specific model is that that’s what students are going to get when they go to high school. Do you have any comment about that?
Matt: Well, in California, we also have two models that were presented to high schools as options and in high school. So there’s a little bit more flexibility than there was in the middle school, so you can’t quite guarantee what’s going on. But the two options in high school are a discipline specific model or a model that involves Earth and space science being embedded throughout some of the other courses, like a class includes Earth science and life science called Living Earth, a course that’s Earth science and chemistry called Chemistry in the Earth System, and your physics and Earth science is called Physics of the Universe.
And so, we’re seeing those integrations happening on a little bit smaller scale within those high school classes, and now, about two thirds of districts in the state of California are opting for this integration of Earth science. So that’s happening very much in the high school level, as it is in the middle school level.
Eugene: Oh, that’s interesting. And do you have any sense for-- in terms of middle school, have you heard any numbers about what percentage are using the discipline specific versus the integrated model?
Matt: I should remember, but I don’t remember right now. So next podcast we’ll look that up for everybody.
Eugene: Oh okay, we’ll check that out. You know, one of the things that when you look through the science framework that you helped write, that an important part of NGSS is a shift in instruction that teachers are asked to make. And of course, this is really the core piece of what’s going to happen in the classroom. I think we discussed before about maybe there being three kind of key areas, but I think there’s a whole bunch of different elements, and I hope over the next few episodes, we can talk about some of these.
But I mean, do you want to start with one-- like when you talk to teachers and ask, “What’s going to be different in my classroom?”-- one of these instructional shifts that the teachers are going to encounter will be encouraged to start to implement?
Matt: Yeah. One of the most common things that I see happening when people are designing lessons and teaching them about how we approach them within NGSS is that they start realizing that there are lessons to fix them-- or not to fix them-- but to make them more NGSS-like, they ended up flipping their lessons upside down. What I mean by that is that we used to often start by telling our students a bunch of science and then we might have them look in nature for evidence of that, or to verify that everything that we told them about the way the world works is actually true. And that’s great if you know how the world works, then this is a very efficient process. But it doesn’t necessarily create the scientists that we want that can discover new things.
And so, we flipped things upside down in NGSS, where we start with a mystery. Every lesson starts with a phenomenon or, like I said, I call it a mystery oftentimes, something we’re trying to figure out and our students are trying to discover things. And so we start with the unknown and the real world situation, and then try and from that, kind of reconstruct a lot of science. And this is, of course, a little bit slower because you’re trying to reinvent hundreds of years of scientific progress within your classroom, and sometimes you short circuit that process a little bit to make it go a little bit faster because we have learned things. But the essence is really trying to get your students to discover the things just like the original professional scientists did.
Eugene: Yeah. Gosh, I really remember having these discussions a few years ago with you about that as well. Now, is there an example you can give us kind of thinking about, like, how we would teach a particular-- how we might have traditionally taught a particular topic and what that might look like with this flipping things upside down?
Matt: Sure. In a chemical reaction, for example, we often would start by telling people that there are two types of chemical reactions. There’s an endothermic reaction and exothermic reaction. And then we’d go into the lab and we’d mix things up and we’d see, “Oh, this one’s endothermic, this one’s exothermic.” And we’d label them based upon key terminology that we had been introduced to in the lecture.
Change that around a little bit, flip it upside down. We’re going to start with mixing together a bunch of random stuff and trying to start to look for patterns and saying, “Oh, gosh, some of these things seem to be heating up and some of them seem to be cooling down. Maybe we need to come up with some sort of word to describe those differences.” And so we basically come up with a label, and at that point, we might want to introduce the scientific label of endothermic and exothermic. Or we could just say heating up reactions and cooling down reactions, and we can eventually add the labels in once we’ve had a chance to really explore those patterns and define them a little bit more. So that would be an example of how we’ve flipped things completely.
Eugene: And I like how you invoke this word ‘patterns’ too, which is, you know, obviously a crosscutting concept that are one of the tools that we use to study that phenomenon.
Matt: Yeah, and that’s really even, you know, it’s-- in the middle school level you’re doing that, at the high school level you’re doing that, and at the elementary school, you’re always, always looking for patterns and trying to discover things from those patterns.
Eugene: So, last time we talked a little bit about this three-dimensional core piece of NGSS. We talked about the science and engineering practices and crosscutting concepts, and I thought we could go through some of these so we could get some of your ideas on how to use these in our teaching. So let’s start with one of the science and engineering practices, which is asking questions and defining problems. Matt, what can you tell us about this particular science and engineering practice?
Matt: Well, the first thing is that-- remember that all of these practices are things we want our students to be doing and we want them to develop skills in them. So who’s asking the questions? It’s the students. And that’s a big shift in many ways, as we’ve been thinking and learning in our teacher education programs about how to ask really good questions of our students. And that’s-- we’ve got a lot of training in that.
Now we need to shift things around a little bit and have them ask questions, and the first thing I can tell you from lots of personal experience and a fair amount of research on this is that students don’t ask questions, unless they’re given a specific curricular space for it, meaning you need to give them time to ask questions and you need to expect them to ask questions. Especially by the time they get to middle school, high school, and college, they’ve been told to hold their questions, stop asking them because it slows things down too much.
And so we need to release them back into that process, which again requires giving them some time to do it. And then spending some time looking at the questions that they do come up with and comparing different questions to try and see, “Hmm, are some of these questions more scientifically useful or scientifically productive?” Like, if we answered this question, would we learn more than if we answered that question? And looking at different sort of types of questions, so we can kind of push our questioning to the next level.
Eugene: Yeah, that’s a great point, and also this idea that if students asked questions, it might be slower. How do you help teachers kind of grapple with, you know, I have all this material I have to get through, and yet, you know, when we flip things upside down and when we’re invoking questions from students, it takes time-- what suggestions would you give for teachers?
Matt: Well, with question asking in particular, I find the question asking to be a really useful assessment tool. I have my students actually ask questions at the end of every class period. And so, it’s a-- by based upon the questions that they ask and the types of knowledge that they express in those questions, I can learn what they’ve gotten out of that day. And so, in some senses by doing that-- by giving them this carved out curricular time for questions, I’m also accomplishing a lot of the other things I need to do in my classroom, like figuring out my formative assessment and figuring out what people know and that’s part of it.
But again, the other thing that we talked about last time was just that this is one of the objectives of science classes is to get our students to ask better questions. And so, we have to devote time to it, just like we have to devote time to the-- covering all of the disciplinary core ideas. We need to devote time to this because this is part of our goal.
Eugene: Yeah, great. And in terms of-- kind of following along with that, you know, there is a progression and it’s in your framework and the California framework, I think, in one of the appendices about-- for example, asking questions and what it looks like as for kindergarten and, you know, the lower grades, all the way to high school. Can you kind of take us through that a little bit, just so we kind of understand, like, if you’re a middle school teacher or if you’re a fifth grade teacher, what those kind of questions are supposed to be like?
Matt: Sure, and actually Appendix One of the front of the California framework, which has all those progressions, and it is a super useful tool. I used it a lot when I was designing curriculum, but also in terms of professional development, it’s been really useful for me to show to teachers because it really helps clarify. It’s like-- it’s kind of like a rubric, like, at my grade level, what is the-- what is this supposed to look like, and how does that compare to a lower grade level?
So with asking questions, we start off in the early elementary grades with doing what kids do naturally as they’re looking at the world around them and they’re being curious and they’re just making observations and asking questions about what they see. So that’s the earliest level.
We want to by the time they get to upper elementary, I want them asking some “What if” questions and trying to think about testable versus non-testable questions, and could they actually come up, you know-- which of these questions could they actually hope to answer by doing some sort of direct observations?
By the time we get to middle school and high school, we’re starting to encourage our students and cultivate the skills of asking questions about more abstract things, not just asking about what you see, but asking about things like data, asking questions about what patterns you see in the data, asking questions about models, like, “How does this component of the model interact with that component?” And asking questions about arguments, like, “I don’t know if you have enough evidence in this here. So can you tell me more about how this reasoning ties to that evidence?” And so really, coming up with more abstract things.
And so, we’re trying to bring our students along, getting them to ask better questions or-- that has to be done at a different way for elementary kids, who are very concrete, versus the high school students, where we’re focusing on questions about different types of things.
Eugene: Yeah, that’s a great point. And kind of following up then, in terms of going over to the one of the crosscutting concepts-- and I wanted to take time to talk about a science and engineering practice but also a crosscutting concept-- and the first one on my list that I see in the Appendix is about patterns, and could you kind of take us through them-- the idea of patterns and the progression that it goes from K to 12 as well?
Matt: Yeah. You’re going to see a pattern here-- a general idea of all of these is that they start off pretty concrete in the elementary level and get more and more abstract. So with the patterns, we start off in the elementary just observing, observing patterns, noticing them. By the time we get to upper elementary, we’re starting to ask our students to classify and break things up into different groups based upon the patterns.
By the time we get to middle school, again, it’s a little bit more abstract. We want to see patterns, not just in the real world, but patterns in data. Also looking here at a different type of not just-- thing-- two things that you can see side by side, but looking at how things change over time a little bit more. That’s a little bit more abstract to be able to think about how things used to look versus how they look now, and so looking at rates of change, trends, those sorts of things.
And then by the time we get to high school, we get much more sophisticated. We’re starting to look at the overlap between patterns and scale, meaning that there are different patterns that are operating at different scales and we’ll-- we can talk about this a little bit later maybe. But when you see a pattern-- when you’re looking from far away, it might look very different than when you’re looking at it much closer. So the macroscopic and the microscopic would be one example of where you’re seeing different patterns that those two different scales and how did those relate to each other-- how does pattern at one scale cause a pattern at a different scale? So that’s very, very high advanced high school stuff.
Eugene: Yeah. And, you know, for a teacher who’s just starting NGSS, let’s say in middle school right now, when you look at their progression, you might read that, “Oh, students have done from K to 5, you know, they-- they built this thing up and now this is where they should be in middle school.” But if they haven’t had the benefit of those students that are coming in of doing any NGSS or if there’s not as much science being taught in elementary school, what kind of work as a teacher have to do to get their students up to these levels so that they’re, you know, by the end of middle school, at the level of asking questions and identifying patterns?
Matt: Well, they’re going to be looking to the progressions and trying to start by, you know, whenever this kids’ are at the time, they need to figure out, “Okay, our students are not really-- if they’re still very concrete and they’re-- and they’re noticing a pattern, then we’ll look at our phenomena from a very concrete perspective and see if we can just push them a little bit further along on that continuum and-- and that’s the only way we can do it.” You can’t-- you can’t short circuit it basically and just start with the-- the advanced stuff without having some of the foundations.
Eugene: Yeah. So I wanted to shift to kind of our kind of second section, which is about climate and the environment. And we’ll review here some of the latest news in this area and talk about how to bring topics-- these kinds of environmental topics-- into our schools and into our classrooms.
So Matt, I don’t know if you had a chance to look at the recent Arctic sea ice data, but right now, we’re, you know, into the spring period, so sea ice is starting to extend again. But the data is showing-- and you can go to the National Sea Ice Center-- but it’s showing that the Arctic sea ice extent is very, very low, lowest on record right now. And this happens to be something that I look at periodic. I’m just kind of curious to see where the Arctic sea ice is at. Have you-- have you had a chance to look at it at all?
Matt: I have-- I was shocked when I saw what-- what things are looking like and I am not a sea ice aficionado like you, I’m afraid. It’s not something I’ve looked at very often, but wow, it’s definitely much-- we’re way below average.
Eugene: Yeah, and as someone who looks at-- I look at it more often, sometimes we’re really below average and then we’ll get a big storm or something will happen and it will pause, and so it’s quite a dynamic environment.
But I’m curious and from your perspective, what suggestions you might have for teachers in kind of bringing features like phenomenon like this that are happening right now-- real time data-- to promote interest in the environment or climate change. Do you have any experience with or have seen good examples of teachers using some real time data in their classrooms?
Matt: Well, students-- they love being up to date and modern, seeing what’s going on. I can see news stories related to what they’re learning about and that just makes everything seem more real. And remember, we’re trying to provide this more authentic science experience-- we’re trying to discover things. And the other thing is trying to figure out. Okay, so you are an Arctic sea ice aficionado. So Eugene, do you know why we have such a low sea ice right now? What is it exactly that’s going on that’s causing this specific year to be so much lower than the other ones? I’m asking.
Eugene: Uhh, no. [laughs] You know, it’s complicated. There’s a lot of different factors going on.
Matt: Yeah, and so I think that part of things is something that teachers might be afraid of. And also that makes it so much more powerful is because here we are, we have a real mystery. And I think that some people might have some good ideas. Maybe our sea ice experts might have some good answers for that. But even then, they might not have all of the answers and you can see that when you actually look at real data. You can actually come up with these phenomena, these mysteries. And so, that’s what the power of real time data often gives us is not just it’s the wow factor of this is actually happening, but also it means that, because it’s happening now, we may not have a good answer for it and that’s science.
Eugene: You know, last week I was talking to a teacher who has been trained in NGSS and said to me, “I’m very comfortable telling students, ‘I don’t know.’” And in fact, it made the student, this teacher, comfortable in the science classroom because there’s, you know, like you said, when you look at real data like that, or we don’t know every field of science perfectly, and he thought that the students really appreciated that and found it really engaging that, “Oh, the teacher doesn’t know. But the teacher says, ‘Hey, let’s try to figure it out.’ Let’s try to make some progress in this area.” And for this teacher, that was very empowering because it didn’t make them nervous about teaching new topics.
Matt: Yeah, I know and I actually happened to be looking at the sea ice extent graphs here and I’m seeing this-- again, these patterns at different scales. I’m seeing that in this, the wintertime you’ve got more ice and then it starts going less and that makes sense to me. And I can totally understand our seasonal thing, but they’re all these little ups and downs that are happening on a scale of, you know, days to weeks, it looks like. And trying to think about what might be causing those and not knowing too much about things. You know, there’s-- I know that wind patterns change from days to weeks.
And so I’m starting to think, “Okay, maybe the wind has something to do with this. You know, maybe there’s different air masses of different temperatures that are causing things to melt.” And I’m pulling my library of stuff that I know, and I’m looking at this and I’m talking out loud about it and that’s exciting for me as a thinker about this one. But hopefully, our students can start doing some of those things and we can help scaffold them, help them ask those questions like, “Okay, what does-- what does happen on the scale of days to weeks that you know about that might affect the sea ice?” And we can actually really do some real science here.
Eugene: Yeah, and if you go to the National Sea Ice Center, some of their scientists are discussing some of those like, why did we lose a whole bunch of ice in this couple weeks or not? Talk about storms, talk about winds, temperature, all those things you just mentioned. And they try to understand these real time features as well.
Can we talk a little bit about the California EP and C’s? Because that is also part of the California framework that’s a little bit different from the national standards. Can you tell us about them and their connection with the NGSS?
Matt: Well, they really dovetail nicely with the expectations from the NGSS for a couple reasons. The first one is the NGSS-- this emphasis on using the three dimensions to explore phenomenon, the mysteries. Well, there are so many important mysteries in our own backyards, having to do with our environmental problems that I think there’s a fantastic opportunity there to tackle a real important phenomena and not just tabletop phenomena that are in a classroom. So that’s the first part of it. But the other one is if you look at our crosscutting concepts, there’s a couple of them that are, you know, that are very important. There’s our systems, and our energy and matter flow.
And the EP and C’s; there are several of them, and several of them really get out this idea of interconnected system of humans and the natural environment or the-- I guess we’re natural too but-- humans and the non-human part of the environment interacting and having complex interactions and having exchanges of matter. And so, one of the environmental principles and concepts talks about how there’s really no impermeable barriers in the world, like, stuff doesn’t just stay where it is. You can never stay in one place forever. And so, that-- when you’re talking about that from the EP and C’s, we’re talking about pollution. That means that pollution happens and it’s hard to contain. If we have nasty stuff, it’s going to get out there and--
But in terms of-- that’s the EP and C’s part, but the NGSS part is tracking the flow of matter through a system and looking at causes and effects, what’s causing it to flow through that system. And so, you really can see this dovetailing really nicely of the NGSS and the EP and C’s. And then one more place they overlap really nicely is especially within our Earth and space science disciplinary core ideas. They’ve divided up NGSS into three-- for Earth and space science-- into three parts. One is kind of about Earth’s history and others about Earth systems, but the third is about human impacts on the Earth. And that’s understanding core ideas about human impacts on the Earth is actually a key part of the DCI’s within NGSS. And I think that all those human impacts are really what the EP and C’s are all about, really sort of putting some framework around those interactions between humans and the non-human parts.
Eugene: Yeah, they do seem to fit in pretty well together as you explained. Let’s go to the final part of our talk today and that’s about burritos. [Matt laughs] So early on, Matt and I discovered that one of the things we have in common is a love for burritos. And although it may be surprising, the subject of burritos isn’t so far away from science education and the environment. So let’s talk burrito. Matt, do your kids like burritos as well?
Matt: They do. They eat them different ways. Jonah tends to like to get a burrito, but then dump it all out onto his plate, and then [Eugene laughs] eat the insides and the tortillas separately.
Eugene: And do you have any suggestions for parents on what great ingredients would kids find fun or they enjoy having in their burritos?
Matt: Oh, all of my kids love beans. This is a-- and then eating them with their fingers when they’re little, and so, beans are a big hit. [laughs]
Eugene: Yeah, and those are whole beans, refried beans?
Matt: We usually do whole beans in our family. That’s because they’re quick and easy to cook and healthy and delicious.
Eugene: So I think beans or something-- that when I lived in Australia-- you know, Australians didn’t have a lot of beans as much, and being Mexican American myself, I was-- I grew up with beans, and I couldn’t find them as much in Australia and-- but there’s-- they’re starting to come. I think that’s a nice staple. Relatedly, have you had the opportunity to use any food topics in any of your own teaching before or do you see, like, how food can be used in an NGSS classroom to some advantage?
Matt: Oh, we talked a lot about-- a lot about food in my physical science class for future teachers. We talked about-- we start the year off actually doing food calorimetry and looking at what it means to have, you know, to have calories and to process the food in your body and what’s going on there and how we’re getting the energy out. And so we, you know, we basically use that as a theme that runs through the entire semester and we don’t really understand the whole thing until we get to the end of the semester when we talk about chemical reactions and things. But it’s the whole semester long that’s based upon that first two days, and of course, my students love getting to burn things on the first day of class. Most professors-- their syllabus-- they go over their syllabus on the first day and then say bye. And in our class, we’re burning things on day one, so. [laughs]
Eugene: Gosh, I want to sign up. [Matt laughs] Well, I think that’s a good place to wrap up. Thanks for joining us, Matt, where we explore NGSS, science education, and the environment with education expert and nice guy, Matt d’Alessio. Thanks for joining us today, Matt, and we’ll see you next time!
Matt: Alright, see you later, Eugene!
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