Ask Matt: Episode 3
In this episode “The California Science Framework and the Impossible Burrito”, Matt talks about his writing experience with the 2016 California Science Framework and his suggestions for favorite chapters for teachers. In addition to a discussion about the California Science Test, Matt also discusses what he sees are the main reasons why teachers find teaching climate change to be a difficult task.
Listen to Episode 3 of ‘Ask Matt’ on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or below:
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Eight Ways To Teach Climate Change In Almost Any Classroom
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 where students use science engineering to solve real world problems.
I’m here with Matt 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 science teacher, runs a sustainability education program at an elementary school, and he spent a year as a stay-at-home dad. Matt cares deeply about the environment, and has also recently received a Distinguished Teaching Award from Cal State Northridge.
I met Matt about three years ago and we agreed-- and he agreed to help our team at Green Ninja with advice as we created our own NGSS curriculum. Today we are an approved science publisher in California, in large part because of Matt’s guidance and advice. So 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.
The format is I ask Matt questions about a range of subjects from NGSS and science teaching to professional training and science content. And hopefully we all learn something about how to make this transition to NGSS easier and more rewarding for teachers and students.
If you 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.
Matt: Ah it’s good to be here.
Eugene: So I went to the main NGSS website, and one of the first things you see is the statement about improving science education through three dimensional learning. It seems to be a big thing.
Matt: No, you have to say it with more gusto-- improving science education through three dimensional learning. [laughs]
Eugene: And that’s how it should be said, and can you tell us a little bit about why three dimensional learning is so important in terms of improving science education?
Matt: Well, so-- we know about these three dimensions within NGSS: What we know about science, how we do science, and how we think about science. But what really makes it three dimensional learning is where we have explicit attention paid to each of those dimensions, but we’re actually going to use the words about those three different dimensions with our students to give them that language to talk about things, and we can take time to explicitly discuss what does it mean to ask good questions, or let’s make sure that we’re looking specifically for cause and effect relationships. It gives us some language to use that we’re going to be able to draw upon throughout the kids K-12 careers and so we want to be able to provide them those words to use that we can build on things and spending the time to do that explicitly.
So it’s not just how we’re doing things within, but making sure we include all three of these dimensions, which a lot of people were doing before in their instruction. Within California standards, we had the content standards, but we also had the investigation and inquiry standards. So in some senses, we did have two of those things. But to really make sure that we’re using the same language-- and relatively simple, you know, there’s eight practices and seven crosscutting concepts-- throughout the whole educational system, I think, is really powerful.
So, in my classroom, I have posters of those eight practices on one wall with blue tape holding them up. On the other wall, I got green painter’s tape to put up the seven crosscutting concepts, and I stand over and walk to them and point to them and all the time in my class to say, “Look at-- look, this is what we’re going to be paying attention to right now.” And it really helps accentuate and heighten those things that make us into good scientists.
Eugene: Yeah, and actually I think having those posters around-- they are good, just reminders for us, for the students, and for the teacher about how you try to bring those into the classroom.
Matt: You can download them from our website. We’ll make sure that there’s a link to that somewhere.
Eugene: It’s a great-- okay, great. I’m going to share with you a quote from the original National Academies report, and I’m just kind of curious of what-- how you react to this quote. It says, “The framework and subsequent standards will not lead to improvements in K-12 science education unless the other components of the system—curriculum, instruction, professional development, and assessment—change so they are aligned with the framework’s vision.”
Given that we’ve been talking about curriculum a bit and will continue to talk about that going forward, I’m curious about the other pieces to this puzzle that they mentioned-- instruction, PD, and assessment-- and how are those going to play a role in the shifts that NGSS is encouraging.
Matt: Well, this podcast and all the things that are going on statewide are about helping teachers shift instruction. So this is a challenge. There’s some great progress that’s been made, but we-- obviously, that’s where the bulk of things, I feel like, lies. But there’s no update I can give you. Each one of the listeners can give us the update from their own classroom and how things are going for that, but it’s a progression that we’ve talked about.
Professional development-- the state has come together in amazing ways, but the California Science Teachers Association, the California Science Project, a whole bunch of people, these statewide rollouts that we’ve had where we’re all getting on the same page and trying to give as much professional development as possible. So I feel like our professional development is focused on helping teachers through this process in a nice way.
And then lastly, assessment. We have these tests that they’re-- the CAST test is out now and I actually have created a PDF that I’ve done with some teachers here locally, which basically walking through the CAST test. And the whole point of doing that is that actually-- it helps teachers see what the shifts are by seeing that end point in mind, what the assessment looks like at the end, and it really actually helps us visualize what the whole thing means. And so that’s nice.
But even things like-- I can give you a story-- I can tell you about the high school part of the NGSS assessments is that when they were first trying to figure out what sort of statewide testing to do, the initial proposal was to do an end of course assessment at the end of the life science course, which is what used to be required under No Child Left Behind nationwide and they were planning on basically doing that at the high school level because we don’t have time for one test and we don’t want to-- we want to cut our testing down, and that was the decision that was initially floated. And we helped organize a huge backlash to that because what does that do?
We’ve been talking about making sure that all standards are being met by all the students, but then you’re only testing on this very small subset of them. There was a huge backlash, and the great news is that the State Board pulled that proposal and put together what we see now for the CAST at the high school level, which is a full assessment that covers all the different aspects of science, life science or science-- physical science, engineering-- in its full three dimensional glory. So that’s really heartening that the state has decided to put their full weight and their full teeth-- I have a slide that I usually show it with the CAST with the teeth-- that is the teeth that’s helping us move this instruction and PD and everything else is that it actually is aligned in a nice way.
Eugene: So you’ve been pretty happy with what you’ve seen in terms of the assessment?
Matt: I’ve been happy with the general spirit, the individual items we always quibble about. And so, I wish that item is different, or that item, but I think that overall, they’re pushing our teachers in the right direction to get there. So, yes.
Eugene: And I’ve been talking to teachers like we’ve been doing recently. I hear a lot about a concern about how students are going to do on this type of test and how different it is from before. For teachers who haven’t seen it, how different is it from earlier types of assessments?
Matt: Well, I tell people that this is a test that the initial specifications-- they gave it to the test writers and said, “You need to give the students situations that they’ve never seen before, and that’s what should be on the test.” And you think about that-- for that versus teaching to the test. How do you teach to a test where the design goal is to show students something they’ve never seen before? And that’s how different it is that we are trying to see just this really interesting phenomena that the students have to engage and many of them are new, not all of them, but many of them are new.
Eugene: And so for the teacher who says, “How do I prepare my students for the CAST test?” And as a publisher here, they’re asking us, “Do you have practice questions?” What kind of suggestions do you have for teachers?
Matt: Well, in terms of how does the teacher prepare, it goes back to our first question is, if you’re used to focus on the three dimensional learning, and in particular, making sure that you’re giving the students those tools in the two dimensions that are kind of the most new to us in the science and engineering practices, that they know how to go about doing the science. And those crosscutting concepts, they know how to think about how to approach new problems and say, “Oh, you know what, this is a problem that I feel like is best solved by thinking about the flow of energy and matter, and I should trace out the energy and matter in this and that should help me understand this new situation that I’ve never seen before.”
Eugene: Yeah, that’s-- and hopefully, that will provide teachers with some confidence that this approach is going to bear out, you know, good things in terms of how other students as well, especially over the years as time continues and students get more used to this approach.
Matt: I hope so.
Eugene: So, going to the California Framework that you were one of the chief authors on, how long is the California Framework and what sections should teachers really pay attention to?
Matt: Well, it’s in PDF form, it’s 1796 pages, which--
Eugene: That’s-- that’s a lot of pages.
Matt: Yes, and I don’t think-- I don’t know anybody that has the full thing printed out. I certainly don’t. And what should you look at? Well, if you’re looking for the sort of basic introduction to NGSS, that’s in the first chapter, and at some point, there’s-- a lot of teachers are beyond that. But I made it so the first, I think, 14 or something pages or so are really the most useful to somebody who’s trying to get their grasp of those what are the three dimensions and how do I use them. That’s a good place to start.
The grade level chapters are really where we try to paint that picture of what does-- could this look like in a classroom and how does it flow over the course of a whole year. So we really focus on those.
The next chapter that I like best is probably the instructional strategies chapter. And I can tell you, it’s actually one of the ones that I had-- I rewrote lots of the chapters at the end and made major changes-- it’s one of the ones that I made the fewest changes in and it was the best to start within a lot of ways, and has all sorts of useful practical tips.
So, for example, there’s a section on notebooking and what are the types of notebook pages that I should have my students thinking about and working on, and it really spells that out for us. Or engineering, what are some of the tools that we give our students in engineering to compare multiple solutions, and there’s some standard tools that we give them and they’re spelled out there. So I feel like there’s a lot of gems in that chapter.
Eugene: That’s great. In fact, I was just recently talking to one of my colleagues about notebooking, and I’ll have to go back to the framework and take a look at that section on that because that could be quite helpful for our teachers.
And in terms of your involvement, which was-- was there one chapter that you had the most-- like you focused on the most or how did-- how were you involved in those different chapters?
Matt: Well, I started off working a lot on the high score science because that’s, of course as an earth scientist, that is my heart and soul. But really, what we ended up figuring out is that the whole K-12 system was we needed to make sure that we were finding ways to integrate earth and space science, kind of the whole thing. And that’s why I ended up playing such a large role is because this is my heart and soul, my area of expertise, and so trying to basically focus on taking what other people had put together all the way along and 50 earth science throughout, was this kind of the main thing that I feel like I brought to this equation.
Eugene: And I remember we were working together during part of this and you were on sabbatical. You had a sabbatical during then, but I remember that there just-- there was a lot of late nights, weren’t there?
Matt: There were a lot of late nights, yes, because we needed to get things-- I’ve never written something where the timeline was dictated by the state law.
[Both laugh]
Eugene: So there was an actual date they had to get it out.
Matt: Yeah.
Eugene: So in the framework that you helped develop, at least in the middle school, there were four instructional segments per grade level with each instructional segment having a set of standards. And it seems to me that some educational folks think this is the preferred option of how to organize curriculum, and so, some of the other publishers followed that.Was that the intention of the framework?
Matt: Not necessarily, no. Or actually, let me rephrase that: No. [laughs] Flat no. I can tell you the chapter that I spent the least time on is actually the preferred integrated model for middle school, and that’s because it came to my plate last. We went through three iterations basically of that chapter that were kind of fresh rewrites in many ways, and we debated about different ways to approach things and we ended up kind of stuck with those for instructional segments in each of the grade levels of the preferred integrated model because it was so late in the game, and we were trying to make a rewrite, but they said you can’t make a major structural change like that. So you need to fit things into those segments and then try and change the flow around a little bit.
So I think that, in fact, that particular model having four instructional segments is too big, and you can see that the curriculum like Green Ninja and just about everybody else’s curriculum has chunked that into smaller pieces and tried to make it work a little bit better. And of course, when you break it into smaller pieces, you can move things around to make them work in a little bit different ways, and we tried to do something in that preferred integrated model in earlier drafts. It didn’t work so well, but we were left with the vestigial structures from it that we couldn’t change, partly--
Eugene: Mhm.
Matt: The framework processes is, like I said, dictated by state laws, timelines, but also the need for public comment and major substantive changes needed to go through public comment, and there wasn’t time to do another round of public comment. And so that ended it. I would say that the product that we came out with is not perfect, and that’s partly why everybody’s curriculum has got some neat variations on that including Green Ninja’s.
Eugene: Yeah, okay that’s-- yeah, that’s interesting because we have had some districts say to us, “Oh, was there a reason that you chose not to do the four instructional segments with the way that the state had suggested?” But those were just examples-- right?-- of ways that you could put these standards together?
Matt: Yes.
Eugene: We’ve talked a bit about this before and that this is one of the hearts, as you say, of NGSS is the shift in instruction. And last week you shared something I found very interesting about how you turn your classroom upside down. And I’m wondering-- and I-- this made a lot of sense to me and I’m wondering if you could provide us with some additional examples of what does that look like in the classroom when you shift your instruction or you turn the class upside down.
Matt: Sure! Well, I know that I remember when we were talking about the Grade 6 Green Ninja curriculum, there are some great things where we’re looking at the origin of sea breezes, and I think the initial drafts of the curriculum that we had for Green Ninja mirrored a lot some of the things that I saw in some of the curriculum that I was working with FOSS with some of my pre-service teachers that I was working with. And there’s this fantastic article in the FOSS curriculum that describes how sea breezes work, and the curriculum and a lot of my-- a lot of the teachers that I work with-- the pre-service teachers-- they will see that article and say, “Wow, this is so clear.” And so, they like to start off by photocopying that handout and handing it to all their students and saying, “Here, read about how sea breezes work and then we’re gonna do this experiment here where we’re going to try and look at convection.” And because it’s such a good beautiful article that lays it all out-- it explains everything, but that’s the upside down way to do it for NGSS.
When we flip that now around, what we want our students to be doing is to be starting off with looking at some example of a real world phenomenon. So that in the case of Green Ninja, we took a little tabletop demonstration of a sea breeze demo where we have some hot things and cold things, and we basically start seeing what happens when there’s this temperature differential there and we start watching the flow of matter, and seeing, “Oh wow, it’s moving around and we’re able to create a little sea breeze by--” I think there’s some incense or a match or something like that where you look at the smoke and see if you actually visualize in real life where things are moving. And so our students see that and they now-- they have this great like, “Whoa, look at how it’s moving,” and they can draw in their science notebook-- they could actually draw out the path of that little smoke of incense.
And then the question is how does it do that? Why is that happening? And they basically are able to kind of come up with things-- “Okay, it has to do something about the air movement and what’s causing the air to move”-- and basically they discovered the differences in air pressure instead of being handed this beautiful diagram from the FOSS creators who created-- we’d like them to be able to basically figure out there must be something here going on and be able to come to the conclusions and maybe at the end, the drawing -- that beautiful drawing -- is one that they produce, instead of one that’s handed to them.
Eugene: And that makes a big difference, doesn’t it?
Matt: It does.
Eugene: Like, in terms of the students really understanding or their retention-- and I suppose that some of the research would suggest that that’s much better way to learn?
Matt: Yeah, well remember, I love this article on the sea breeze and I think it’s so clear. But you know whether or not my students can actually use that information or even apply it to any other thing. Can you take that same idea and then when we look at the Earth, which is very hot in the middle and cooler to the-- you know, the outer space is very cold-- and you’ve got the same sort of idea of a temperature differential-- can you explain why we have convection inside the Earth? Taking it completely to a different context, and if you are just handed that material ahead of time with that perfect thing that explains the sea breeze, it’s harder to basically abstract the ideas and figure out how things-- what was really important in it. And so, our students really are able to transfer their knowledge more when they construct it themselves.
Eugene: Yeah, that’s a great example of bringing that to a totally different context but applying the same science principles.
I like to spend a little time with SEPs and CCCs every time. And one of the science and engineering practices that seem particularly important in middle school is developing and using models, and can you tell us what is a model and why are they important in NGSS?
Matt: Well, yeah, chapter one of the framework shows this nice table that talks about all their different types of models. There’s so many different types. There’s physical models. There’s kinesthetic models where you use your body to represent things. There’s pictorial models where you’re drawing diagrams. There’s conceptual models. There’s mathematical models, computational modeling - the list goes on.
And so, what is a model? What ties all these things together is really when we’re talking about a model-- I think they should’ve filled this in and they actually do in some places-- it’s a model of a system. So the practice of modeling is intricately intertwined with the idea of systems and systems models, the crosscutting concept, so you’ve got to think about the different pieces of your system and how they interact with each other. And basically a model is a representation of different pieces and how they interact, so you’ve got that.
The other thing about a model that’s really important I like to talk about we use in everyday language we’d talk about like a model of a car that looks like a car. But in order for it to be a model within NGSS, you need to be able to really use that object or that model to predict something about its behavior. So you need to be able to use-- to represent something about the behavior of it, not just its appearance.
And so, we find our teachers often making a model of a cell, which is a three dimensional representation of a cell, and that’s very different. Representation is just showing what the pieces are. To make a model, you need to talk about how those pieces interact and how that affects the overall behavior of the system.
Eugene: Yeah, that’s an important distinction there, isn’t it?
Matt: Yeah.
Eugene: I’m gonna put you on the spot here, Matt. If we look at one of the standards, ESS2-4, it says, “Develop a model to describe the cycling of water through the Earth’s system driven by energy from the sun and the force of gravity.”
So, as a teacher who reads this and says, “Oh, develop a model to do this.” What does this mean for teachers and what kind of models could the teacher expect that students could develop for that particular standard?
Matt: That’s great. So, it’s a model of a system, so we want to make sure that we’re getting our students familiar with that are all the pieces in the system that’s still there, the components of them. And so, you need to know about groundwater, you need to know about surface water, the water vapor in the atmosphere. So you want to make sure you have all those and you want to be talking about the ways that those interact with each other. Evaporation, precipitation, infiltration, soaking into the ground -- all those things that are classically talked about with the water cycle. But to make a model of it is actually another way where we can give an example of turning things upside down.
If I’m teaching about the water cycle under my old regime, I pull out this beautiful diagram of the water cycle-- the USGS has it in like 20 languages or something like that, it’s translated. It is a beautiful diagram, and it shows a lot of these interactions that is a perfect example of a model of the water cycle. But if you look at that-- what you’ve just read to me was to develop a model to describe the cycling of water? If you’re asking the students to be able to develop the model, then you can’t start by handing them the completed beautiful diagram. That’s a pictorial model and it’s exactly the product that we’re looking for. That’s what we want, but we need to figure out how our students are going to get there and we have to build that out piece by piece and look at everything.
So, I often take my students outside and I pour water on the ground and then, “Okay, where did the water-- you know, after a few minutes, the water is not there on the ground anymore-- where did it go?” And you know, we say, “Well, maybe it evaporated away. Well, it went away really quickly. How quickly does stuff evaporate?” You have some sense-- all students have some sense of that from their showers. So you can start, “Okay. Well, maybe it went into the ground.” So now we need to track and we need to basically be able to draw arrows representing, “It started and then down.” And then we can ask the question, “What caused it to go down?” ‘Cause that’s part of what you also told me that our model has to have some-- you know, these two things are interacting, the water on the surface and the water in the ground. What’s causing that interaction, what’s driven in this case by gravity -- the same thing that causes the raindrops to fall.
And so, really being able to be nailing down each one of those pieces, one of the components, but also the arrows that connect them and really understanding how is that arrow-- what’s causing that? And in the case of the water cycle, it’s basically-- it’s any order that’s going downwards is driven by gravity and any arrow that’s going upwards, there’s gotta be some force causing that. And it’s almost always the energy from the sun, causing evaporation. An occasional groundwater pump.
Eugene: So what a great standard that is!
Matt: It is a great standard, yes, because it’s totally achievable for a middle school student to do as well because it’s, you know, you can really look at all of these different parts of it and build it up, build it up, piece by piece. Usually when we’re asking our students to develop models, it means that they’re going to have to build it up, piece by piece.
Eugene: Yeah, and then you see the crosscutting-- there’s a crosscutting concept embedded in there too, right?
Matt: Well, I mentioned at least a couple of my used cause and effect. But as they’re systems and systems models and in the water cycle, we’re very much concerned with the cycling of matter. So I got three crosscutting concepts that I feel like are really important in that particular standard there.
Eugene: Yeah, that’s-- I think that’s why, you know, when-- as a teacher is going to approach and read these standards, those sometimes-- those other dimensions are explicit in there. Sometimes they’re not as explicit. But this is a nice one because it draws some of those quite apparent.
Matt: Yeah.
Eugene: And that can help with the learning.
So I’d like to shift to our section on climate and the environment, where we turn our attention to climate change in the environment and we’ll review some of the latest news in this area and talk about how to bring such topics into our schools and classrooms.
So there was a recent article on KQED about eight ways to teach climate change in almost any classroom, and they also included some recent polling that suggested that fewer than half of all teachers talk about climate change and they suggested various reasons for this, and we’ll share that article with listeners if they want to check it out. But what challenges do you think exist when teaching climate change and what can teachers do to overcome some of these challenges?
Matt: Well, the number one thing I hear is lack of familiarity-- they’re most concerned about that. That’s a part of it. It’s a little bit controversial for some places, but a lot of our schools and different parts of California, it’s not controversial. When we were writing the framework, it turned out to be incredibly non-controversial. There was opportunity for public comment and people to bring up concerns about the controversy and almost nobody did. I think maybe there was-- maybe out of hundreds of public comments, I think there was exactly one that mentioned something about that.
So if anybody is afraid of it because of the controversy, I’m going to encourage you to push forward because it turns out that seems to be less and less of an issue. It’s really about our teachers just not feeling comfortable with any aspects of it, not knowing enough to feel comfortable teaching it. So those are the things.
For myself, as somebody that does have a relatively good grasp of a lot of the things and certainly a lot of interesting anecdotes that I can pull from, one of the challenges I see is about how to encourage the study of it and encourage optimism, while also being scary enough to spur people to action and trying to figure out this balance of where the-- how much to focus on the direness of the situation and how much to-- you know, people start tuning out when you start talking about the world is going to end. Well, first of all, I don’t believe you. And second of all, if they did believe you, then what can I do about it? It’s very-- it elicits feelings of helplessness essentially, which is not-- it doesn’t get you anywhere either. So you tune out when you’re helpless, you tune out when it’s overwhelming, and you tune out-- this is-- when you’re afraid, you might tune out. So these are all things going against it that I face even once I do know things, and I think that teachers will be getting to that stage in their development next.
Eugene: Yeah, and that’s something that we have learned in the environmental community that just pointing out all the challenges and the real impact on the environment may not be motivating enough for everyone to actually want to learn more or know, or think about what to do about it.
Matt: Yeah, and in a future episode, we’re going to turn the tables and you’re going to become the expert because you might have done a lot more reading and thinking about this research on that communicating about climate change. And so I would love to hear your takes on some of that.
Eugene: Yeah, I’m happy to share those at a future time.
Going back to the controversy issue, you know it is interesting that we found when we go out and talk to teachers that there are some communities that feel that maybe the parents are the ones who are going to push back. And for example, I was in the Central Valley in a district and we were talking about climate change and some of the teachers were saying, “I’m concerned about how some of the parents are going to react to this.” So, do you have any ideas of what might should they refer the-- well, these are our standards and this is what California has decided, or do you have some other approaches to tell teachers to feel a little bit more comfortable now?
Matt: I probably wouldn’t go with the ‘the government is shoving this down our throats’ approach. I would actually start with exactly where NGSS tells us to start, which is looking at the local and relevant things that are happening around us. And so, if I’m in the Central Valley and, you know, I’ve got this water shortage-- the drought-- if I’m in an agricultural community and we’re looking at that, and we’re looking at, okay, ask you if you’ve been-- your family’s been farming in this community for generations. Ask your grandfather or grandmother about how this situation that we’re facing today compared to previous times and that they’ve had challenges. And in some cases, it’s as bad as it was before because we did have extreme events before.
And the question is, how often are these things happening? And we’re really trying to say that these are-- either way, we want to make-- be able to explain the extreme events. They definitely are happening now, whether they’re more often or less often is the next piece that we’re going to be looking for bigger, broader data because when you start asking your grandfather or your grandmother, what do they remember, well we all know that grandma and grandpa don’t remember everything just right. And so maybe we need to get a little bit more systematic, so they remember that extreme drought. Let’s look in the data and let’s look at a graph, and we’ll see, yes, they’re so right that that drought did happen.
But, you know, it was really rare back then. But now, look at how that same drought, or whether it’s even more extreme, is happening, you know, every couple of years now when it’s the one that they remember that happened in once in three decades early on in their careers. And so, we’re really trying to bring out local and relevant. Start with what’s actually happening in your community and those things people tend to be not controversial about and it’s about the causes. And so once we establish these effects are there, then we can start asking questions about why is that happening, how often is it happening, look at real data.
Eugene: Yeah, I love that bringing-- talking to people and getting their perspective, but then using real data to provide a scientific context for that, I think that’s a good-- that’s a great suggestion.
Our last little segment is on burritos. So early on, Matt and I discovered that one of the things we have in common is a love for burritos. It may be surprising, but the subject of burritos isn’t so far from science education and the environment. So let’s talk burritos. Matt, have you heard of the Impossible Burger or this kind of vegan meat? According to some reports, these meat alternatives are starting to really take off. For example, both Del Taco and Burger King have signed on for our nationwide distribution of this product. And it can’t be long until we encounter an Impossible Burrito. So, Matt, what do you think about this possibility and what questions would you ask about such a product, especially in a science classroom?
Matt: Yeah, that’s great. Well, one of my friends was actually the chief scientist for one of the groups that wasn’t working on beef, they were working on eggs and vegan egg substitutes. And just thinking about it, we’re doing all this DNA sequencing, trying to come up with a list of all sorts of different protein options that they could then characterize and figure out which proteins have the properties that were similar to the proteins that were in the eggs that they were trying to reproduce and it was just this fascinating thing. You know, he’s this fantastic Berkeley chemical engineer that’s well trained. He used to study AIDS viruses and how to-- you know, all different things like that. But he’s putting it to work for this idea of food, or at least he was for a while until he moved on to a new and exciting adventure.
But it’s a fascinating question and I’m not a huge fan of them, in principle, because I like my food to be food as opposed to engineered food and there are plenty of good things that one can eat that are plant based, like the Impossible Burrito or the Impossible Beef vegan substitutes. There are plenty of things that are actually foods, because as much as we have people as brilliant and hardworking as my friend who were trying to figure out how to reproduce all the properties, I’m not sure that we understand all of the properties that are, you know, that are really-- remember, it’s a system and systems have system level properties that are more than the sum of their parts that we may not be able to characterize necessarily.
So that’s my general first blush. With that said, I’m interested in trying the new fast food versions just out of curiosity and see what they’re like. And in a classroom, we can ask the same questions we do about any of our foods, which is looking at, “What’s their carbon footprint and their energy?”, and then, “How is this going to help us solve some of our bigger picture energy problems?”, and also, “How do they fit into the broader environmental picture?”, “Is this going to help us protect our environment or is it going to hurt in what ways?” And I think there’s some fantastic things where we can think about that meat product, that fake meat product, as a part of a bigger system and really trace out how we get to that meat product at the end and see, and then put it in the context of all those exciting environmental problems.
So there’s a lot one could do with that and I think it fits in. Do we have some-- do we have a chapter or section in grade 7 in Green Ninja? Don’t we, about food?
Eugene: Yeah, we do.
Matt: So that’s-- I think that’s exactly where it would go and try to look at the climate impacts of different foods.
Eugene: Yeah, it is interesting. I think it’s something we’re going to continue to follow and as we ask students to try to design solutions for the types of issues they’re interested in. For example, in food, what I find interesting about this is that some of the big retailers of fast food are finding an interest in this and how long before our local taquerias started to have this, and what impact would that have on people and on their attitudes about what they’re eating, and then all of the science underneath it.
Matt: Yeah.
Eugene: So it’s an area that we’ll continue to pay attention to. But I think--
Matt: It’s a big shift, it’s a big shift in our-- we’re not talking about a big NGSS shift. This is a big shift in our food system, and I think it’s an interesting one, like, to watch like you said, so stay tuned.
Eugene: Yeah, that’s right. So I think that’s a good place to wrap up. Thanks for joining us at ‘Ask 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: Bye bye! See you next time!
[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 where students use science engineering to solve real world problems.
I’m here with Matt 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 science teacher, runs a sustainability education program at an elementary school, and he spent a year as a stay-at-home dad. Matt cares deeply about the environment, and has also recently received a Distinguished Teaching Award from Cal State Northridge.
I met Matt about three years ago and we agreed-- and he agreed to help our team at Green Ninja with advice as we created our own NGSS curriculum. Today we are an approved science publisher in California, in large part because of Matt’s guidance and advice. So 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.
The format is I ask Matt questions about a range of subjects from NGSS and science teaching to professional training and science content. And hopefully we all learn something about how to make this transition to NGSS easier and more rewarding for teachers and students.
If you 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.
Matt: Ah it’s good to be here.
Eugene: So I went to the main NGSS website, and one of the first things you see is the statement about improving science education through three dimensional learning. It seems to be a big thing.
Matt: No, you have to say it with more gusto-- improving science education through three dimensional learning. [laughs]
Eugene: And that’s how it should be said, and can you tell us a little bit about why three dimensional learning is so important in terms of improving science education?
Matt: Well, so-- we know about these three dimensions within NGSS: What we know about science, how we do science, and how we think about science. But what really makes it three dimensional learning is where we have explicit attention paid to each of those dimensions, but we’re actually going to use the words about those three different dimensions with our students to give them that language to talk about things, and we can take time to explicitly discuss what does it mean to ask good questions, or let’s make sure that we’re looking specifically for cause and effect relationships. It gives us some language to use that we’re going to be able to draw upon throughout the kids K-12 careers and so we want to be able to provide them those words to use that we can build on things and spending the time to do that explicitly.
So it’s not just how we’re doing things within, but making sure we include all three of these dimensions, which a lot of people were doing before in their instruction. Within California standards, we had the content standards, but we also had the investigation and inquiry standards. So in some senses, we did have two of those things. But to really make sure that we’re using the same language-- and relatively simple, you know, there’s eight practices and seven crosscutting concepts-- throughout the whole educational system, I think, is really powerful.
So, in my classroom, I have posters of those eight practices on one wall with blue tape holding them up. On the other wall, I got green painter’s tape to put up the seven crosscutting concepts, and I stand over and walk to them and point to them and all the time in my class to say, “Look at-- look, this is what we’re going to be paying attention to right now.” And it really helps accentuate and heighten those things that make us into good scientists.
Eugene: Yeah, and actually I think having those posters around-- they are good, just reminders for us, for the students, and for the teacher about how you try to bring those into the classroom.
Matt: You can download them from our website. We’ll make sure that there’s a link to that somewhere.
Eugene: It’s a great-- okay, great. I’m going to share with you a quote from the original National Academies report, and I’m just kind of curious of what-- how you react to this quote. It says, “The framework and subsequent standards will not lead to improvements in K-12 science education unless the other components of the system—curriculum, instruction, professional development, and assessment—change so they are aligned with the framework’s vision.”
Given that we’ve been talking about curriculum a bit and will continue to talk about that going forward, I’m curious about the other pieces to this puzzle that they mentioned-- instruction, PD, and assessment-- and how are those going to play a role in the shifts that NGSS is encouraging.
Matt: Well, this podcast and all the things that are going on statewide are about helping teachers shift instruction. So this is a challenge. There’s some great progress that’s been made, but we-- obviously, that’s where the bulk of things, I feel like, lies. But there’s no update I can give you. Each one of the listeners can give us the update from their own classroom and how things are going for that, but it’s a progression that we’ve talked about.
Professional development-- the state has come together in amazing ways, but the California Science Teachers Association, the California Science Project, a whole bunch of people, these statewide rollouts that we’ve had where we’re all getting on the same page and trying to give as much professional development as possible. So I feel like our professional development is focused on helping teachers through this process in a nice way.
And then lastly, assessment. We have these tests that they’re-- the CAST test is out now and I actually have created a PDF that I’ve done with some teachers here locally, which basically walking through the CAST test. And the whole point of doing that is that actually-- it helps teachers see what the shifts are by seeing that end point in mind, what the assessment looks like at the end, and it really actually helps us visualize what the whole thing means. And so that’s nice.
But even things like-- I can give you a story-- I can tell you about the high school part of the NGSS assessments is that when they were first trying to figure out what sort of statewide testing to do, the initial proposal was to do an end of course assessment at the end of the life science course, which is what used to be required under No Child Left Behind nationwide and they were planning on basically doing that at the high school level because we don’t have time for one test and we don’t want to-- we want to cut our testing down, and that was the decision that was initially floated. And we helped organize a huge backlash to that because what does that do?
We’ve been talking about making sure that all standards are being met by all the students, but then you’re only testing on this very small subset of them. There was a huge backlash, and the great news is that the State Board pulled that proposal and put together what we see now for the CAST at the high school level, which is a full assessment that covers all the different aspects of science, life science or science-- physical science, engineering-- in its full three dimensional glory. So that’s really heartening that the state has decided to put their full weight and their full teeth-- I have a slide that I usually show it with the CAST with the teeth-- that is the teeth that’s helping us move this instruction and PD and everything else is that it actually is aligned in a nice way.
Eugene: So you’ve been pretty happy with what you’ve seen in terms of the assessment?
Matt: I’ve been happy with the general spirit, the individual items we always quibble about. And so, I wish that item is different, or that item, but I think that overall, they’re pushing our teachers in the right direction to get there. So, yes.
Eugene: And I’ve been talking to teachers like we’ve been doing recently. I hear a lot about a concern about how students are going to do on this type of test and how different it is from before. For teachers who haven’t seen it, how different is it from earlier types of assessments?
Matt: Well, I tell people that this is a test that the initial specifications-- they gave it to the test writers and said, “You need to give the students situations that they’ve never seen before, and that’s what should be on the test.” And you think about that-- for that versus teaching to the test. How do you teach to a test where the design goal is to show students something they’ve never seen before? And that’s how different it is that we are trying to see just this really interesting phenomena that the students have to engage and many of them are new, not all of them, but many of them are new.
Eugene: And so for the teacher who says, “How do I prepare my students for the CAST test?” And as a publisher here, they’re asking us, “Do you have practice questions?” What kind of suggestions do you have for teachers?
Matt: Well, in terms of how does the teacher prepare, it goes back to our first question is, if you’re used to focus on the three dimensional learning, and in particular, making sure that you’re giving the students those tools in the two dimensions that are kind of the most new to us in the science and engineering practices, that they know how to go about doing the science. And those crosscutting concepts, they know how to think about how to approach new problems and say, “Oh, you know what, this is a problem that I feel like is best solved by thinking about the flow of energy and matter, and I should trace out the energy and matter in this and that should help me understand this new situation that I’ve never seen before.”
Eugene: Yeah, that’s-- and hopefully, that will provide teachers with some confidence that this approach is going to bear out, you know, good things in terms of how other students as well, especially over the years as time continues and students get more used to this approach.
Matt: I hope so.
Eugene: So, going to the California Framework that you were one of the chief authors on, how long is the California Framework and what sections should teachers really pay attention to?
Matt: Well, it’s in PDF form, it’s 1796 pages, which--
Eugene: That’s-- that’s a lot of pages.
Matt: Yes, and I don’t think-- I don’t know anybody that has the full thing printed out. I certainly don’t. And what should you look at? Well, if you’re looking for the sort of basic introduction to NGSS, that’s in the first chapter, and at some point, there’s-- a lot of teachers are beyond that. But I made it so the first, I think, 14 or something pages or so are really the most useful to somebody who’s trying to get their grasp of those what are the three dimensions and how do I use them. That’s a good place to start.
The grade level chapters are really where we try to paint that picture of what does-- could this look like in a classroom and how does it flow over the course of a whole year. So we really focus on those.
The next chapter that I like best is probably the instructional strategies chapter. And I can tell you, it’s actually one of the ones that I had-- I rewrote lots of the chapters at the end and made major changes-- it’s one of the ones that I made the fewest changes in and it was the best to start within a lot of ways, and has all sorts of useful practical tips.
So, for example, there’s a section on notebooking and what are the types of notebook pages that I should have my students thinking about and working on, and it really spells that out for us. Or engineering, what are some of the tools that we give our students in engineering to compare multiple solutions, and there’s some standard tools that we give them and they’re spelled out there. So I feel like there’s a lot of gems in that chapter.
Eugene: That’s great. In fact, I was just recently talking to one of my colleagues about notebooking, and I’ll have to go back to the framework and take a look at that section on that because that could be quite helpful for our teachers.
And in terms of your involvement, which was-- was there one chapter that you had the most-- like you focused on the most or how did-- how were you involved in those different chapters?
Matt: Well, I started off working a lot on the high score science because that’s, of course as an earth scientist, that is my heart and soul. But really, what we ended up figuring out is that the whole K-12 system was we needed to make sure that we were finding ways to integrate earth and space science, kind of the whole thing. And that’s why I ended up playing such a large role is because this is my heart and soul, my area of expertise, and so trying to basically focus on taking what other people had put together all the way along and 50 earth science throughout, was this kind of the main thing that I feel like I brought to this equation.
Eugene: And I remember we were working together during part of this and you were on sabbatical. You had a sabbatical during then, but I remember that there just-- there was a lot of late nights, weren’t there?
Matt: There were a lot of late nights, yes, because we needed to get things-- I’ve never written something where the timeline was dictated by the state law.
[Both laugh]
Eugene: So there was an actual date they had to get it out.
Matt: Yeah.
Eugene: So in the framework that you helped develop, at least in the middle school, there were four instructional segments per grade level with each instructional segment having a set of standards. And it seems to me that some educational folks think this is the preferred option of how to organize curriculum, and so, some of the other publishers followed that.Was that the intention of the framework?
Matt: Not necessarily, no. Or actually, let me rephrase that: No. [laughs] Flat no. I can tell you the chapter that I spent the least time on is actually the preferred integrated model for middle school, and that’s because it came to my plate last. We went through three iterations basically of that chapter that were kind of fresh rewrites in many ways, and we debated about different ways to approach things and we ended up kind of stuck with those for instructional segments in each of the grade levels of the preferred integrated model because it was so late in the game, and we were trying to make a rewrite, but they said you can’t make a major structural change like that. So you need to fit things into those segments and then try and change the flow around a little bit.
So I think that, in fact, that particular model having four instructional segments is too big, and you can see that the curriculum like Green Ninja and just about everybody else’s curriculum has chunked that into smaller pieces and tried to make it work a little bit better. And of course, when you break it into smaller pieces, you can move things around to make them work in a little bit different ways, and we tried to do something in that preferred integrated model in earlier drafts. It didn’t work so well, but we were left with the vestigial structures from it that we couldn’t change, partly--
Eugene: Mhm.
Matt: The framework processes is, like I said, dictated by state laws, timelines, but also the need for public comment and major substantive changes needed to go through public comment, and there wasn’t time to do another round of public comment. And so that ended it. I would say that the product that we came out with is not perfect, and that’s partly why everybody’s curriculum has got some neat variations on that including Green Ninja’s.
Eugene: Yeah, okay that’s-- yeah, that’s interesting because we have had some districts say to us, “Oh, was there a reason that you chose not to do the four instructional segments with the way that the state had suggested?” But those were just examples-- right?-- of ways that you could put these standards together?
Matt: Yes.
Eugene: We’ve talked a bit about this before and that this is one of the hearts, as you say, of NGSS is the shift in instruction. And last week you shared something I found very interesting about how you turn your classroom upside down. And I’m wondering-- and I-- this made a lot of sense to me and I’m wondering if you could provide us with some additional examples of what does that look like in the classroom when you shift your instruction or you turn the class upside down.
Matt: Sure! Well, I know that I remember when we were talking about the Grade 6 Green Ninja curriculum, there are some great things where we’re looking at the origin of sea breezes, and I think the initial drafts of the curriculum that we had for Green Ninja mirrored a lot some of the things that I saw in some of the curriculum that I was working with FOSS with some of my pre-service teachers that I was working with. And there’s this fantastic article in the FOSS curriculum that describes how sea breezes work, and the curriculum and a lot of my-- a lot of the teachers that I work with-- the pre-service teachers-- they will see that article and say, “Wow, this is so clear.” And so, they like to start off by photocopying that handout and handing it to all their students and saying, “Here, read about how sea breezes work and then we’re gonna do this experiment here where we’re going to try and look at convection.” And because it’s such a good beautiful article that lays it all out-- it explains everything, but that’s the upside down way to do it for NGSS.
When we flip that now around, what we want our students to be doing is to be starting off with looking at some example of a real world phenomenon. So that in the case of Green Ninja, we took a little tabletop demonstration of a sea breeze demo where we have some hot things and cold things, and we basically start seeing what happens when there’s this temperature differential there and we start watching the flow of matter, and seeing, “Oh wow, it’s moving around and we’re able to create a little sea breeze by--” I think there’s some incense or a match or something like that where you look at the smoke and see if you actually visualize in real life where things are moving. And so our students see that and they now-- they have this great like, “Whoa, look at how it’s moving,” and they can draw in their science notebook-- they could actually draw out the path of that little smoke of incense.
And then the question is how does it do that? Why is that happening? And they basically are able to kind of come up with things-- “Okay, it has to do something about the air movement and what’s causing the air to move”-- and basically they discovered the differences in air pressure instead of being handed this beautiful diagram from the FOSS creators who created-- we’d like them to be able to basically figure out there must be something here going on and be able to come to the conclusions and maybe at the end, the drawing -- that beautiful drawing -- is one that they produce, instead of one that’s handed to them.
Eugene: And that makes a big difference, doesn’t it?
Matt: It does.
Eugene: Like, in terms of the students really understanding or their retention-- and I suppose that some of the research would suggest that that’s much better way to learn?
Matt: Yeah, well remember, I love this article on the sea breeze and I think it’s so clear. But you know whether or not my students can actually use that information or even apply it to any other thing. Can you take that same idea and then when we look at the Earth, which is very hot in the middle and cooler to the-- you know, the outer space is very cold-- and you’ve got the same sort of idea of a temperature differential-- can you explain why we have convection inside the Earth? Taking it completely to a different context, and if you are just handed that material ahead of time with that perfect thing that explains the sea breeze, it’s harder to basically abstract the ideas and figure out how things-- what was really important in it. And so, our students really are able to transfer their knowledge more when they construct it themselves.
Eugene: Yeah, that’s a great example of bringing that to a totally different context but applying the same science principles.
I like to spend a little time with SEPs and CCCs every time. And one of the science and engineering practices that seem particularly important in middle school is developing and using models, and can you tell us what is a model and why are they important in NGSS?
Matt: Well, yeah, chapter one of the framework shows this nice table that talks about all their different types of models. There’s so many different types. There’s physical models. There’s kinesthetic models where you use your body to represent things. There’s pictorial models where you’re drawing diagrams. There’s conceptual models. There’s mathematical models, computational modeling - the list goes on.
And so, what is a model? What ties all these things together is really when we’re talking about a model-- I think they should’ve filled this in and they actually do in some places-- it’s a model of a system. So the practice of modeling is intricately intertwined with the idea of systems and systems models, the crosscutting concept, so you’ve got to think about the different pieces of your system and how they interact with each other. And basically a model is a representation of different pieces and how they interact, so you’ve got that.
The other thing about a model that’s really important I like to talk about we use in everyday language we’d talk about like a model of a car that looks like a car. But in order for it to be a model within NGSS, you need to be able to really use that object or that model to predict something about its behavior. So you need to be able to use-- to represent something about the behavior of it, not just its appearance.
And so, we find our teachers often making a model of a cell, which is a three dimensional representation of a cell, and that’s very different. Representation is just showing what the pieces are. To make a model, you need to talk about how those pieces interact and how that affects the overall behavior of the system.
Eugene: Yeah, that’s an important distinction there, isn’t it?
Matt: Yeah.
Eugene: I’m gonna put you on the spot here, Matt. If we look at one of the standards, ESS2-4, it says, “Develop a model to describe the cycling of water through the Earth’s system driven by energy from the sun and the force of gravity.”
So, as a teacher who reads this and says, “Oh, develop a model to do this.” What does this mean for teachers and what kind of models could the teacher expect that students could develop for that particular standard?
Matt: That’s great. So, it’s a model of a system, so we want to make sure that we’re getting our students familiar with that are all the pieces in the system that’s still there, the components of them. And so, you need to know about groundwater, you need to know about surface water, the water vapor in the atmosphere. So you want to make sure you have all those and you want to be talking about the ways that those interact with each other. Evaporation, precipitation, infiltration, soaking into the ground -- all those things that are classically talked about with the water cycle. But to make a model of it is actually another way where we can give an example of turning things upside down.
If I’m teaching about the water cycle under my old regime, I pull out this beautiful diagram of the water cycle-- the USGS has it in like 20 languages or something like that, it’s translated. It is a beautiful diagram, and it shows a lot of these interactions that is a perfect example of a model of the water cycle. But if you look at that-- what you’ve just read to me was to develop a model to describe the cycling of water? If you’re asking the students to be able to develop the model, then you can’t start by handing them the completed beautiful diagram. That’s a pictorial model and it’s exactly the product that we’re looking for. That’s what we want, but we need to figure out how our students are going to get there and we have to build that out piece by piece and look at everything.
So, I often take my students outside and I pour water on the ground and then, “Okay, where did the water-- you know, after a few minutes, the water is not there on the ground anymore-- where did it go?” And you know, we say, “Well, maybe it evaporated away. Well, it went away really quickly. How quickly does stuff evaporate?” You have some sense-- all students have some sense of that from their showers. So you can start, “Okay. Well, maybe it went into the ground.” So now we need to track and we need to basically be able to draw arrows representing, “It started and then down.” And then we can ask the question, “What caused it to go down?” ‘Cause that’s part of what you also told me that our model has to have some-- you know, these two things are interacting, the water on the surface and the water in the ground. What’s causing that interaction, what’s driven in this case by gravity -- the same thing that causes the raindrops to fall.
And so, really being able to be nailing down each one of those pieces, one of the components, but also the arrows that connect them and really understanding how is that arrow-- what’s causing that? And in the case of the water cycle, it’s basically-- it’s any order that’s going downwards is driven by gravity and any arrow that’s going upwards, there’s gotta be some force causing that. And it’s almost always the energy from the sun, causing evaporation. An occasional groundwater pump.
Eugene: So what a great standard that is!
Matt: It is a great standard, yes, because it’s totally achievable for a middle school student to do as well because it’s, you know, you can really look at all of these different parts of it and build it up, build it up, piece by piece. Usually when we’re asking our students to develop models, it means that they’re going to have to build it up, piece by piece.
Eugene: Yeah, and then you see the crosscutting-- there’s a crosscutting concept embedded in there too, right?
Matt: Well, I mentioned at least a couple of my used cause and effect. But as they’re systems and systems models and in the water cycle, we’re very much concerned with the cycling of matter. So I got three crosscutting concepts that I feel like are really important in that particular standard there.
Eugene: Yeah, that’s-- I think that’s why, you know, when-- as a teacher is going to approach and read these standards, those sometimes-- those other dimensions are explicit in there. Sometimes they’re not as explicit. But this is a nice one because it draws some of those quite apparent.
Matt: Yeah.
Eugene: And that can help with the learning.
So I’d like to shift to our section on climate and the environment, where we turn our attention to climate change in the environment and we’ll review some of the latest news in this area and talk about how to bring such topics into our schools and classrooms.
So there was a recent article on KQED about eight ways to teach climate change in almost any classroom, and they also included some recent polling that suggested that fewer than half of all teachers talk about climate change and they suggested various reasons for this, and we’ll share that article with listeners if they want to check it out. But what challenges do you think exist when teaching climate change and what can teachers do to overcome some of these challenges?
Matt: Well, the number one thing I hear is lack of familiarity-- they’re most concerned about that. That’s a part of it. It’s a little bit controversial for some places, but a lot of our schools and different parts of California, it’s not controversial. When we were writing the framework, it turned out to be incredibly non-controversial. There was opportunity for public comment and people to bring up concerns about the controversy and almost nobody did. I think maybe there was-- maybe out of hundreds of public comments, I think there was exactly one that mentioned something about that.
So if anybody is afraid of it because of the controversy, I’m going to encourage you to push forward because it turns out that seems to be less and less of an issue. It’s really about our teachers just not feeling comfortable with any aspects of it, not knowing enough to feel comfortable teaching it. So those are the things.
For myself, as somebody that does have a relatively good grasp of a lot of the things and certainly a lot of interesting anecdotes that I can pull from, one of the challenges I see is about how to encourage the study of it and encourage optimism, while also being scary enough to spur people to action and trying to figure out this balance of where the-- how much to focus on the direness of the situation and how much to-- you know, people start tuning out when you start talking about the world is going to end. Well, first of all, I don’t believe you. And second of all, if they did believe you, then what can I do about it? It’s very-- it elicits feelings of helplessness essentially, which is not-- it doesn’t get you anywhere either. So you tune out when you’re helpless, you tune out when it’s overwhelming, and you tune out-- this is-- when you’re afraid, you might tune out. So these are all things going against it that I face even once I do know things, and I think that teachers will be getting to that stage in their development next.
Eugene: Yeah, and that’s something that we have learned in the environmental community that just pointing out all the challenges and the real impact on the environment may not be motivating enough for everyone to actually want to learn more or know, or think about what to do about it.
Matt: Yeah, and in a future episode, we’re going to turn the tables and you’re going to become the expert because you might have done a lot more reading and thinking about this research on that communicating about climate change. And so I would love to hear your takes on some of that.
Eugene: Yeah, I’m happy to share those at a future time.
Going back to the controversy issue, you know it is interesting that we found when we go out and talk to teachers that there are some communities that feel that maybe the parents are the ones who are going to push back. And for example, I was in the Central Valley in a district and we were talking about climate change and some of the teachers were saying, “I’m concerned about how some of the parents are going to react to this.” So, do you have any ideas of what might should they refer the-- well, these are our standards and this is what California has decided, or do you have some other approaches to tell teachers to feel a little bit more comfortable now?
Matt: I probably wouldn’t go with the ‘the government is shoving this down our throats’ approach. I would actually start with exactly where NGSS tells us to start, which is looking at the local and relevant things that are happening around us. And so, if I’m in the Central Valley and, you know, I’ve got this water shortage-- the drought-- if I’m in an agricultural community and we’re looking at that, and we’re looking at, okay, ask you if you’ve been-- your family’s been farming in this community for generations. Ask your grandfather or grandmother about how this situation that we’re facing today compared to previous times and that they’ve had challenges. And in some cases, it’s as bad as it was before because we did have extreme events before.
And the question is, how often are these things happening? And we’re really trying to say that these are-- either way, we want to make-- be able to explain the extreme events. They definitely are happening now, whether they’re more often or less often is the next piece that we’re going to be looking for bigger, broader data because when you start asking your grandfather or your grandmother, what do they remember, well we all know that grandma and grandpa don’t remember everything just right. And so maybe we need to get a little bit more systematic, so they remember that extreme drought. Let’s look in the data and let’s look at a graph, and we’ll see, yes, they’re so right that that drought did happen.
But, you know, it was really rare back then. But now, look at how that same drought, or whether it’s even more extreme, is happening, you know, every couple of years now when it’s the one that they remember that happened in once in three decades early on in their careers. And so, we’re really trying to bring out local and relevant. Start with what’s actually happening in your community and those things people tend to be not controversial about and it’s about the causes. And so once we establish these effects are there, then we can start asking questions about why is that happening, how often is it happening, look at real data.
Eugene: Yeah, I love that bringing-- talking to people and getting their perspective, but then using real data to provide a scientific context for that, I think that’s a good-- that’s a great suggestion.
Our last little segment is on burritos. So early on, Matt and I discovered that one of the things we have in common is a love for burritos. It may be surprising, but the subject of burritos isn’t so far from science education and the environment. So let’s talk burritos. Matt, have you heard of the Impossible Burger or this kind of vegan meat? According to some reports, these meat alternatives are starting to really take off. For example, both Del Taco and Burger King have signed on for our nationwide distribution of this product. And it can’t be long until we encounter an Impossible Burrito. So, Matt, what do you think about this possibility and what questions would you ask about such a product, especially in a science classroom?
Matt: Yeah, that’s great. Well, one of my friends was actually the chief scientist for one of the groups that wasn’t working on beef, they were working on eggs and vegan egg substitutes. And just thinking about it, we’re doing all this DNA sequencing, trying to come up with a list of all sorts of different protein options that they could then characterize and figure out which proteins have the properties that were similar to the proteins that were in the eggs that they were trying to reproduce and it was just this fascinating thing. You know, he’s this fantastic Berkeley chemical engineer that’s well trained. He used to study AIDS viruses and how to-- you know, all different things like that. But he’s putting it to work for this idea of food, or at least he was for a while until he moved on to a new and exciting adventure.
But it’s a fascinating question and I’m not a huge fan of them, in principle, because I like my food to be food as opposed to engineered food and there are plenty of good things that one can eat that are plant based, like the Impossible Burrito or the Impossible Beef vegan substitutes. There are plenty of things that are actually foods, because as much as we have people as brilliant and hardworking as my friend who were trying to figure out how to reproduce all the properties, I’m not sure that we understand all of the properties that are, you know, that are really-- remember, it’s a system and systems have system level properties that are more than the sum of their parts that we may not be able to characterize necessarily.
So that’s my general first blush. With that said, I’m interested in trying the new fast food versions just out of curiosity and see what they’re like. And in a classroom, we can ask the same questions we do about any of our foods, which is looking at, “What’s their carbon footprint and their energy?”, and then, “How is this going to help us solve some of our bigger picture energy problems?”, and also, “How do they fit into the broader environmental picture?”, “Is this going to help us protect our environment or is it going to hurt in what ways?” And I think there’s some fantastic things where we can think about that meat product, that fake meat product, as a part of a bigger system and really trace out how we get to that meat product at the end and see, and then put it in the context of all those exciting environmental problems.
So there’s a lot one could do with that and I think it fits in. Do we have some-- do we have a chapter or section in grade 7 in Green Ninja? Don’t we, about food?
Eugene: Yeah, we do.
Matt: So that’s-- I think that’s exactly where it would go and try to look at the climate impacts of different foods.
Eugene: Yeah, it is interesting. I think it’s something we’re going to continue to follow and as we ask students to try to design solutions for the types of issues they’re interested in. For example, in food, what I find interesting about this is that some of the big retailers of fast food are finding an interest in this and how long before our local taquerias started to have this, and what impact would that have on people and on their attitudes about what they’re eating, and then all of the science underneath it.
Matt: Yeah.
Eugene: So it’s an area that we’ll continue to pay attention to. But I think--
Matt: It’s a big shift, it’s a big shift in our-- we’re not talking about a big NGSS shift. This is a big shift in our food system, and I think it’s an interesting one, like, to watch like you said, so stay tuned.
Eugene: Yeah, that’s right. So I think that’s a good place to wrap up. Thanks for joining us at ‘Ask 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: Bye bye! See you next time!
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