This unit helps students develop an understanding of the elements of evolution by natural selection and learn to apply that understanding to protect populations endangered by urbanization. Students learn through modeling, reading and discussing adaptations of published scientific studies of nonhuman populations impacted by urbanization. They develop criteria for designing urban systems that protect populations from the harmful effects of fragmentation in urban systems and evaluate proposals for development in a real US city.

TAKEAWAYS:
Leave motivated to use OpenSciEd’s storyline to teach the elements of evolution by natural selection using real-world examples. Students will learn how their understanding of biological concepts can be used to design more sustainable systems that benefit the human and more-than human world.

SPEAKERS:
Sara Krauskopf (University of Wisconsin-Madison: No City, No State), Wayne Wright (NSTA: McLean, VA), Kate Henson (University of Colorado Boulder: Boulder, CO)

Students and educators must remain connected to, and motivated by, the elements of their world that not only spark curiosity and generate wonder but are real. Students care deeply about the environment, climate change, food insecurity, and sustainability. A sustainable and resilient future will only be achieved if we begin to make sense of these challenges in smaller, coherent investigations; starting in our science classrooms. An enormous piece of the sustainability puzzle lies within sustainable food systems. Food production and agriculture provide limitless opportunities for students to explore phenomena among the interactions of living things and the earth’s systems. Further, the practice of agriculture, since its origins, has been a continuous series of design challenges to cultivate nature for the needs of humans. This presentation provides a lens through which students and educators can find opportunities to spark inquiry and solve real-world problems.

TAKEAWAYS:
Educators will see successful examples of authentic phenomena and problems found within food and agricultural systems that are relevant to all students. We will demonstrate how all three dimensions of NGSS are used to make sense of these real-world phenomena.

SPEAKERS:
John McNamara (Wash. State Academy of Sciences), Brian Beierle (Relevant Classroom, a Division of Vivayic, Inc.: No City, No State)

California Northstate University College of Health Sciences offers several outreach programs supporting middle and high school students and teachers. Our outreach goals are to expand opportunities, interest, and awareness for students interested in pursuing careers in the STEM and health science professions and to increase and diversify the pipeline of students with access to these career opportunities. Currently, we have 3 active outreach programs engaging the regional communities: Biology Education to Careers, Institute for Chemistry and Physics for Middle School Science Teachers, and Student Powered Activities for Reach Knowledge. Over 400 students have participated in our various outreach programs, and we have added over 50 educators to our training network. Our regional community school affiliations have grown to over 30. By sharing our outreach experiences, we hope to inspire educators in engaging their regional communities about careers in STEM and health science professions.

TAKEAWAYS:
California Northstate University is dedicated to sharing insights gained from developing and implementing our outreach programs and to offer guidance for educators and institutions that seek to engage their local communities about careers in STEM and health sciences.

SPEAKERS:
Allan Ancheta (California Northstate University: Rancho Cordova, CA)

This session will focus on sharing instructional modules that have been developed to facilitate relationships between herbaria and high school students to highlight the importance of plants and preserving botanical specimens. Many times plants are overlooked or considered less significant than animals. This research-backed perspective is known as Plant Awareness Disparity. These free, research-based modules allow students to investigate their own botanical history by connecting with plants that are important to them and their families, then experience the entire process of collecting, mounting, cataloging, and digitizing their specimen. There are 10 modules that are aligned with the NRC K-12 Framework and heavily rely upon student-centered and place-based learning. All participants will be given access to the modules and encouraged to interact with the module developers as they implement the activities.

TAKEAWAYS:
Many times, plants are overlooked and considered less significant than animals. This is known as Plant Awareness Disparity. Participants in this session will learn about free instructional modules that will help high school students connect with plants through exploring their own botanical history.

SPEAKERS:
Kelly Moore (Tennessee Tech: Cookeville, TN)

The Stan-X network is a world-wide partnership of public and private schools that work together to provide research-based learning experiences for students (https://stan-x.org). Through collaboration with the research group led by Dr. Seung Kim at Stanford University, the schools have adopted a fruit fly-based program that provides opportunities for authentic research that generates high-quality data and resources impacting the community of science. Stan-X program elements can fit flexibly into almost any science curriculum at middle or high school grade levels. In our session, we will detail the development and growth of our program and describe examples of courses that have been developed in schools in the U.S. and abroad. We will also describe how Stan-X works with schools to fund program creation and develop instructor skills for guiding students through authentic, open-ended research, while developing sufficient autonomy to modify or expand research-based science teaching.

TAKEAWAYS:
Through Stan-X, middle school and high school students learn science through authentic, open-ended, publishable research. Coordination between schools, both public and private, across the world can enhance scientific learning and research opportunities for your students and for teachers!

SPEAKERS:
Nicole Lantz (The Lawrenceville School: Lawrenceville, NJ)

The NGSS provides a powerful set of performance expectations to guide improvements in science education. Translating these performance expectations into practices requires support and professional learning opportunities for teachers. Even after a decade, the conceptual shifts and three-dimensional learning laid forth in A Framework, and defined in the NGSS, continues to be a challenge. As we shift students’ learning experiences from "learning about" to "figuring out" so too should we offer professional learning experiences to educators that allow them to experience the three-dimensional elements of science authentically. Immersive or place-based professional learning for teachers builds understanding, empathy, and connection to the three dimensions of NGSS. Learn how to connect educators and enhance their understanding of disciplinary core ideas through immersive experiences.

TAKEAWAYS:
Participants will learn about the benefits of immersive and place-based learning and how it can bring the sensemaking process to life. We will provide phenomena and examples which fully engage the three dimensions of the NGSS approach, and are in use in daily practice by researchers and scientists.

SPEAKERS:
Rick Henningfeld (Vivayic, Inc.: No City, No State), Brian Beierle (Relevant Classroom, a Division of Vivayic, Inc.: No City, No State)

How much assistance should teachers provide to learners and how should they schedule it? When should teachers mix together different kinds of practice problems? Are mnemonics useful? The pragmatic answers to these questions provided by cognitive science tap the innate strengths of human brain systems and have been shown to improve students' ability to retrieve and apply information. I will synthesize and present data about the effectiveness of a variety of different general learning strategies. I will utilize a variety of fun and engaging demonstrations of cognitive phenomena to help teachers understand and learn how to use these cognitive learning strategies. For example, attendees will try to remember new facts through self-testing or re-studying. I will interpret the results of the cognitive demonstrations, connect the results to existing lab-based and classroom data, and explain the brain-based mechanisms behind the effects.

TAKEAWAYS:
Attendees will learn how to apply multiple practical, flexible, and research-based cognitive strategies, including retrieving information from memory, distributing practice across time, scaffolding, and mixing together different examples, within their own classrooms to improve student learning.

SPEAKERS:
Jonathan Tullis (The University of Arizona: Tucson, AZ)

I will take participants through my process of crafting sets of formative multiple choice questions that each use 2 of the 3 dimensions of NGSS, so that all dimensions are addressed. I will also show my process for refining free response questions to get the exact responses I am looking for and that allow for an ease of grading and seeing students’ understanding. I will provide examples from my own classroom & direct them to where they can find more examples from various storylines. As an iHub Chemistry writer, I learned to write 3-D multiple choice formative questions. An assessment graduate course taught me how to write quality distractors to see limits of student understanding and get useful feedback data. I merge these 2 in my own classroom to create assessments to get to what my students know. I will share my learning from these trainings and more to set teachers on the path to quality 3-D classroom assessments.

TAKEAWAYS:
Learn to craft three-dimensional assessments, multiple choice, and free response. Using quality distractors in multiple choice formatives allows you to pinpoint student misconceptions. Free response questions direct students to the specific response you want so that grading goes quicker.

SPEAKERS:
Sarah Evans (Olathe South High School: Olathe, KS)

Content for our presentation includes: Opening-Introduction, History and Background of uBEATS, Highlights of the Program, Standards Alignment to NGSS and NCHSE, and a Canvas course walk-through Activity-In this activity portion, we will be taking a “Deep Dive” into uBEATS. We will preview a selected sample Freshman biology unit (Cellular Biology) and show specific modules that could be integrated into that unit of study (Cellular Structure and Function, Mitosis, and Cancer). The modules used in this preview will provide two different interactive activities that we will complete together while viewing them in the module. These modules will provide a review of core content, provide an extension to the core content, and bring in a career connection (Careers in Medical Imaging and Therapeutic Sciences). Closing-Register, Module Preview, social media, Podcast

TAKEAWAYS:
In this session, attendees will walk away with a clear understanding of what uBEATS is, how to effectively use this resource, and be fully prepared for implementation in their classrooms.

SPEAKERS:
Zuzi Greiner (Instructional Technologist)

Food is a basic necessity of life, yet in the United States there are over 6,500 food deserts affecting 19 million people. Food deserts are geographic areas that lack access to affordable, healthy food options. During this session, participants will engage in conversations for how to address this inequity with students as they engineer food producing hydroponic systems. The Hydroponics storyline is the third in a series being developed by a group of 25+ educators from the midwest for science and agriculture teachers that engage students in developing explanations for agricultural phenomena and solving real-world problems. Students utilize the three dimensions of NGSS in each of the storylines as they learn about food systems, or the production, processing, distribution, and consumption of food products and interactions with the natural environment. Specific emphasis is placed on developing skills related to the Scientific & Engineering Practices and building Crosscutting Concepts.

TAKEAWAYS:
Participants will learn about a new storyline on hydroponics that explores food deserts which are geographic areas that lack access to affordable, healthy food options. Attendees will discuss one option for addressing this inequity with students as they engineer food-producing hydroponic systems.

SPEAKERS:
Chris Embry Mohr (Olympia High School: Stanford, IL)

Every crisis brings opportunity, and behind the challenges we face as science educators is a looming opportunity to engage our students in some of the most important questions that affect their lives. Even our youngest students are acutely aware of the ways in which crises such as the Covid pandemic, extreme weather, and climate change have impacted their lives, and this awareness provides a genuine opportunity to engage students with the scientific process. Contrary to what the daily grind of the news cycle seems to tell us, we are actually living in a golden age of scientific innovation and discovery. Almost without exception, the crises we face today have scientific solutions, and each of them provides a way to make science meaningful, interesting, and exciting to our students. That is the challenge we face, but it is also why today is actually the “Best of Times” to be a science educator, and we should make the most of it.

TAKEAWAYS:
Participants will be presented with some of the principal challenges facing science educators around the nation, and will examine specific ways educators can respond effectively to these challenges.

SPEAKERS:
Kenneth Miller (Brown University: Providence, RI)

Making the move from a traditional grading system to a standards based grading system can be an overwhelming task. It was especially challenging for two of Stevenson High School’s largest teams: AP biology (10 teachers) and accelerated chemistry (18 teachers). We will share how we came up with our standards and our success criteria for teaching skills and scoring student work. We will also share how those standards and success criteria have changed over the last four years. Attendees will be able to view our assessments, look at student work, and then score sample assessments. Presenters will also share several different calibration strategies that have worked for our larger team, ranging from Google jamboards, Google slides, and Google forms.

TAKEAWAYS:
Attendees will walk away with a scaffolded way to determine the skills they want to assess in their course and how they can begin to develop success criteria. Attendees will also take away some strategies for how to calibrate their scoring.

SPEAKERS:
Kristen One (Adlai E. Stevenson High School: Lincolnshire, IL), Nathan Gustin (Adlai E. Stevenson High School: Lincolnshire, IL), Karen O'Connor (Adlai E. Stevenson High School: Lincolnshire, IL)

This presentation will involve a Google Slide show detailing why some of our beloved labs do not meet the NGSS standards and how we can adjust these labs through phenomena, critical thinking questions, CER, and rubrics to meet those standards. Furthermore, this presentation's primary purpose is to highlight why we struggle with "students today." It is a fact that students have changed; we expect students to change. It's the fact that we as educators have not adapted to the students that are in front of us today. They have changed but have we, as educators? Have our lessons and lab experiences changed with them? This presentation will show how to adapt and adjust old lab experiences (biology, chemistry, environmental science, and physics) to meet the NGSS standards and why newer phenomena-based lessons differ from old recipe labs. If time permits, teachers will work on a lab they want to update.

TAKEAWAYS:
The main takeaway from this presentation will be how we incorporate rubrics, critical thinking questions, and phenomena into our lab experiences to meet the students & standards of today—cultivating an engaging and collaborative experience for the students.

SPEAKERS:
Dennis Dagounis (Berkeley Heights Public Schools: Berkeley Heights, NJ)

I will walk the audience through a landing page of my scale development for grading based off of Marzano’s book of scales for NGSS. I will explain how to convert the 0-4 grade into percentages for conventional grading systems. I will walk them through how to allow students to self-assess their knowledge gain based on objectives and putting those objectives into ladders of curriculum sequence. I will also explain how to use benchmark sheets for the Science and Engineering Practices that match their SEP part of the scale. I will also share the books and websites I gained my knowledge from, so attendees can develop their own mental model of the system for Standards-Based Grading and Learning.

TAKEAWAYS:
You will walk away with a landing page that lays out a system that can be your starting point into SBG & L in the three dimensions, with many resources contained within.

SPEAKERS:
Michelle Gall (North Bend Central Junior/Senior High School: North Bend, NE)

Many scientists argue that we live in a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – named because human activity has become the most powerful driver of global change. That sounds intriguing… but what does it actually mean? Which human activities are driving global change? What changes are these drivers causing? How do those changes affect the biosphere? Interestingly, answering these questions – even in a brief presentation that restricts the number of drivers of change to a handful – often seems to “take the edge off” ideological bias that stubbornly impedes communication about the significance of climate change and other global change phenomena. This approach is also more scientifically accurate than ascribing all threats to ecosystem functions and biodiversity exclusively to climate change. As global human population rises toward 9 billion, understanding the multiple ways that our activities affect the biosphere is essential for efforts to find a safe operating space for humanity.

TAKEAWAYS:
Human-biosphere interactions offer relevant narratives and conceptual frameworks that integrate cause and effect; systems and system models; structure and function; and stability and change.

SPEAKERS:
Joseph Levine (Science Writer and Producer: Concord, MA)

The need for identification and belonging in the scientific community begins in the biology curriculum. This requires an understanding about belonging and meaningful inclusion that supports equitable classroom practices and equitable science content and pedagogy. The emergent themes from ethnographic interviews, archival data, and science explorations were used to provide exemplary biology lessons using lived experiences. These lessons are supported by the three dimensions of the Next Generation Science Standards. In this presentation the NGSS Nature of Science understandings such as “Science is a Way of Knowing,” “Science is a Human Endeavor,” and “Science Addresses Questions About the Natural and Material World,” will be emphasized. This presentation will also focus on the rationale and benefit to teachers and students for developing equity-mindedness, and an understanding of belonging, for meaningful inclusion using implementation examples provided.

TAKEAWAYS:
Attendees will learn about the connection between identification and belonging, and equitable classroom practices and science content. The research literature and biographies of scientists are used to describe how the emergent themes brings equity into the biology lesson.

SPEAKERS:
Catherine Quinlan (Howard University)

For Teachers, By Teachers -- A group of 25+ educators from the Midwest are currently developing a series of storyline units for science and agriculture teachers that engage students in developing explanations for agricultural phenomena and solving real-world problems. Students utilize the three dimensions of NGSS in each of the storylines as they learn about food systems, or the production, processing, distribution, and consumption of food products and interactions with the natural environment. During this session, participants will learn about storyline #2 which challenges students to figure out how different soils affect the kinds and quantities of food commodities that can be produced. Topics include: what is soil, effects of soil on plant growth, movement of matter and energy in soil, and how to decrease human impact on soils and biodiversity. Specific emphasis is placed on developing skills related to the Scientific & Engineering Practices and building Crosscutting Concepts.

TAKEAWAYS:
Participants will engage in activities that are part of a new storyline unit on how soil affects the types and quantities of food commodities grown. Topics include what is soil, the effect of soil on plant growth, movement of matter and energy through soils, and how to decrease human impact on soils.

SPEAKERS:
Chris Embry Mohr (Olympia High School: Stanford, IL)

The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center (DDPSC) in St. Louis, MO, is the world's largest non-academic plant science research institute. DDPSC collaborates with K-12 schools and higher education institutions to offer authentic research experiences (AREs) and course-based research experiences (CUREs), allowing students to participate in real science as practicing scientists. DDPSC’s 6-12 geospatial education program engages students to use GIS and remote sensing tools to address local plant science and agriculture challenges. DDPSC also partners with AVR companies like Zspace to offer students X-reality learning experiences that foster engagement in science practice and communication. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, we measure the impact of these programs on students’ STEM identity, interests, and career interests.

TAKEAWAYS:
The Danforth Center collaborates with K-12 and higher education to provide research, geospatial, and X-reality experiences for students in and out of the classroom to shape their STEM identities and expand their thinking about careers in STEM.

SPEAKERS:
Ashley Kass (Donald Danforth Plant Science Center: No City, No State), Kristine Callis-Duehl (Donald Danforth Plant Science Center: Saint Louis, MO)

The presentation begins with an introduction to our NIH interdisciplinary initiative followed by an overview of the unit. This phenomenon-based unit is composed of 6 3D lessons aligned with the NGSS. Participants will engage in various science and Nature of Science activities focusing on how to support students in developing informed views about science. Presenters will share examples of actual student work, teacher feedback and other relevant artifacts. Activities include interactive Jamboard on living and nonliving things exploring viruses, sharing what students from our study know about coronaviruses, tackling the misconception of "COVID-19 is just the flu", and modeling viral spread using a simplified mathematical model for high school. Finally, examples of actual student’s public health reports connecting wastewater surveillance to community decision making will be showcased. The presentation will end with a discussion on adoption considerations for others and future improvements.

TAKEAWAYS:
Engage in a series of interdisciplinary 3-D lessons on science, technology, and public health using relevant phenomena like COVID-19, water quality, & wastewater treatment. All supporting documents and activities will be shared with the participants. Examples of student artifacts will be showcased.

SPEAKERS:
Sagan Goodpaster (University of Kentucky: Lexington, KY), Jeff Chalfant (Missouri University of Science and Technology: Rolla, MO), Sahar Alameh (University of Kentucky: Lexington, KY)

During our district's "austerity" years (around 2008) our supply budget was slashed and has not returned. Our Biology team developed low-cost wet-lab experiences for students to develop skills in experimental design, long-term data collection, graphing, and writing scientifically. These activities are used in our honors and regular biology courses. Check out one of our experiences- (sample of a whiteboard and a class set of the algae lab in our Biofuel Unit.) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XMpQ5SsBw0YgU9frO2L4lKwv-L38BkQg/view?usp=sharing Students were tasked with maximizing algae growth over two weeks, measuring with turbidity, and then analyzing their protocol compared to the class. You can see not all were successful which leads to rich conversations.

TAKEAWAYS:
Bring home six low-cost, highly engaging lab experiences that can be supported with a minimal financial cost!

SPEAKERS:
Jacqueline Svetich (Science Teacher: Naperville, IL), Adrianne Toomey (Neuqua Valley High School: Naperville, IL)

The need for student identification and belonging in the scientific community begins in the biology curriculum. This requires the use of scientific practices to facilitate sensemaking that supports equitable classroom practices and equitable science content and pedagogy. This presentation provides examples of engaging phenomena that highlight the lived experiences and narratives of diverse scientists and that supports meaningful inclusion in the classroom. This presentation also focuses on the rationale and benefits to teachers and students for developing equity-mindedness for meaningful inclusion. These lesson ideas and strategies are supported by the three dimensions of the Next Generational Science Standards. Attendees will learn how to help students engage in critical thinking skills, learn science, and build understandings related to the social and cultural nature of science. Connections to the three dimensions of STEM will be made. This presentation draws funded projects.

TAKEAWAYS:
Use engaging phenomena from diverse scientists alongside inquiry and argumentation to engage in scientific practices and scientific text, supported by the NGSS three dimensions of STEM. Connections to Common Core and equitable classroom practices are made.

SPEAKERS:
Catherine Quinlan (Howard University)

The unique nature of this presentation leverages the extensive knowledge and experience of both a chemistry and a biology educator (who is also a research scientist) to show how teachers can use biotechnologies, such as DNA Fingerprinting and CRISPR Cas-9, to motivate student exploration while expanding their chemistry knowledge and inspiring them to pursue research. This topic is particularly important because CRISPR Cas-9 is at the forefront of medical breakthroughs such as CAR-T cell cancer treatments and gene therapy. Unfortunately, this topic has not yet been used to its full potential in the classroom. This presentation will raise awareness among teachers of how to explain and utilize biotechnologies in various ways. Specifically, this session will show how to use chemistry to explain CRISPR Cas-9 while emphasizing the six elements of life, functional groups, and macromolecules (using hands-on molecular models) to leverage sense making to explain these complex processes.

TAKEAWAYS:
Participants will learn how to excite students to learn and apply Chemistry necessary to understand the latest breakthroughs in biotechnology such as DNA Fingerprinting and CRISPR-Cas9. This presentation will showcase the crosscutting concept of systems and system models.

SPEAKERS:
Susan Allison (Dawson Education Service Cooperative: Arkadelphia, AR), Patrycja Krakowiak (Biology Instructor: Hot Springs, AR)

In this session, we will introduce teachers to a standards-unpacking document Kansas Department of Education is developing to provide teachers with unpacked standards and ideas to guide NGSS planning. Using appendices E (K-12 DCI), F (K-12 SEP), and G (K-12 CCC) from the NGSS Framework supports vertical alignment of each of the three dimensions which allows teachers to identify the grade-band aligned experiences that students need in order to reach the full level of the standard through three-dimensional sensemaking. We will use the tool to identify what is new and unique to the focus grade-band to ensure grade-level appropriate learning experiences and expectations. We will show teachers how the unpacked standard tool promotes using their own students’ interests and experiences to plan to incorporate local phenomenon as a key part of three-dimensional sensemaking. We will provide teachers with access to and/or copies of the standards unpacking tool.

TAKEAWAYS:
We share a tool used to unpack standards for foundational concepts & key experiences that students need to make sense of all three dimensions of a standard. Participants will be able to consider their own students’ interests and identities to plan to support sensemaking for their student population.

SPEAKERS:
Stephanie Alderman-Oler (Washington High School: Kansas City, KS), Sarah Evans (Olathe South High School: Olathe, KS)