Changes are afoot in the US science curriculum. With new NGSS guidelines on the horizon, many teachers are concerned about how these developments will affect them and how it will change their classroom. Over the next few blog posts we will be exploring these challenges further, but today we are looking into how films and videos can help this transition to an NGSS classroom.

What is NGSS?

The Next Generation Science Standards is a new learning framework for science in the U.S. that is “designed to help realize a vision for education in the sciences and engineering in which students, over multiple years of school, actively engage in scientific and engineering practices and apply crosscutting concepts to deepen their understanding of the core ideas in these fields.”

How can video learning support the NGSS concepts? 

NGSS involves making teaching and learning science more approachable, efficient and engaging – resonating some of Twig World’s own philosophies. 

At the core of the Next Generation Science Standards is a focus on the student as the constructor of meaning through immersion in the science and engineering practices. 

Here’s how teachers can use video to achieve this using the 5 E’s framework:

Engage: Introduce a concept through a video to mentally engage students. After the video, you can open up discussion to assess what students have learnt from watching the educational film.

The video not only captures student interest but also provides an opportunity for them to express what they know about the concept or skill being developed, and helps them to make connections between what they know and the new ideas. 

Explore: Students carry out hands-on activities in which they can explore the concept or skill. They grapple with the problem or phenomenon and describe it in their own words. This phase allows students to acquire a common set of experiences that they can use to help each other make sense of the new concept or skill. 

Where space or resources are an issue, teachers can use video to showcase an activity or experiment and open up a discussion.

Explain: The significance of this phase is that experience follows explanation. After students have explored a concept, the teacher explains the phenomena using the terms the students have developed. This is tricky because at this point, the teacher must also steer the students towards the appropriate scientific language. 

Here, the teacher can start a discussion making a list of all the terms the students have come up with to explain the phenomena. A complementary or glossary film can be played on the same concept at this point. You can now use the terms the film uses  and substitute them with some of the key terms the students used to describe the phenomena, leaving the rest of the sentence the same. This helps students learn a scientific language which encourages further investigations and inquiry.

Elaborate: Think vertical! NGSS stresses on vertical alignment among the grades which means that students don’t end up learning the same topic twice. Instead students are encouraged to expand their existing knowledge to new information learnt in different subjects and apply this to real world situations.

Videos that are mapped to topics allow teachers to find relevant and complementary films quickly and efficiently, allowing students to get a succinct, focussed overview of each topic, from a real world viewpoint. For example, a physics lesson on sound waves can be easily linked to a biology lesson on adaptive divergence in certain species within a matter of minutes using video.

Evaluate: This is where teachers get a chance to evaluate student progress. But it’s not just teachers assessing the student’s progress but also the students assessing their own understanding of the topic at hand. Most videos come with activities like quizzes and games which is an exciting and interactive way of evaluating student knowledge.

Video adds the sixth E to the teaching framework, which is Enjoyment. The foundation of teaching any subject, especially science is to make it fun and get students to enjoy what they are learning. It is important to ignite their curiosity to seek out knowledge and ask the right questions. And it isn’t just enjoyment for the students but also teachers. Videos dramatically cuts down on lesson preparation time and helps lower teaching workload overall, allowing teachers to enjoy actually teaching their students.

As the saying goes: teach a student how to learn and they will learn well for a day. Get them to enjoy what they learn and they will learn for life.

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