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Showing posts from November, 2023

NWESD's SMC and Instructional Materials in the age of OpenSciEd

Current State of NGSS-Aligned Materials Because of the time it takes to do full curricular reviews and the resources at their disposal, I often defer to EdReports for evaluating complete curricular offerings. At this time, EdReports has identified only one national K-5 curriculum (Amplify), only two national MS curricula (Amplify and OpenSciEd), and one HS curriculum (BSCS Biology) as being fully-aligned to the NGSS. History of NWESD and NGSS aligned Materials NWESD first engaged in K-5 Amplify a few years before the pandemic through our science materials center and at the recommendation of our K-5 collaborative adoption effort. At that time, OpenSciEd was not yet fully released for MS and  they had not yet started any work in the K-5 world. So K-5 Amplify received a very hearty recommendation from the teachers to the districts and our SMC board made a decision to adopt Amplify the way our co-op model always had: individual districts would purch