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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 purchase their Amplify materials and "deposit" them with the SMC so that partner districts could also benefit from them when the weren't being used by the owning districts.

There were two things that got in the way of this adoption.

  1. Districts discovered that the collaborative adoption process through our SMC did not meet the requirements for their individual school boards and district policies around adoption.

  2. The pricing scheme that was shared with our SMC support of that time, Joanne Johnson, was incomplete. The actual cost of adoption of Amplify was far more expensive than the co-op had been led to believe.

As a result, some districts adopted Amplify, anticipating and counting on SMC support; and we had many districts that could not adopt. This has kept our region in a patchwork state, but it has helped our SMC identify its mission in supporting districts "where they are at." 

Since the Co-Op Adoption

Since the time of that adoption cycle, OpenSciEd for MS [LINK] has been fully released and evaluated by both EdReports and the NextGenScience Peer Review panelists and has been found to be fully aligned. OpenSciEd for HS [LINK] has completed field testing and some units have completed revision and are released (we anticipate full revisions and release to be completed by Fall of 2024). And just this September, OpenSciEd for K-5 [LINK] began field testing (we anticipate the first fully revised unit for grades K, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 sometime this Spring or Summer). 

EdReports only evaluates complete offerings, so we will have to wait some time on the HS and K-5 reports. But as individual OSE units are released, they are being evaluated using the NextGenScience Peer Review panel. So far all of the six released HS units have been deemed exemplary and have received the NGSS Design Badge [LINK]. It is admittedly conjecture at this point, but I anticipate the same will be true of the K-5 materials; and I expect that both HS and K-5 will receive the high alignment ratings from EdReports when they are fully released.

Because of the cost differential, the exceptional reviews that OSE has received, and the fact that OpenSciEd is quickly becoming the lingua franca about science education nationally, I anticipates broad adoption within our region: either of the original OER materials, or of traditional publisher productions of it (such as Carolina Biological's version, which is the version our SMC has been investing in at the MS level). And so, I am preparing the field with the language and instructional models teachers are likely to experience when engaging in a curriculum adoption for their district. And our SMC wants to support teachers taking on these new paradigms with instructional materials. But not just the OSE materials.

The SMC supports districts, not curricula

None of that history or recent reports detracts from the quality of the materials that people have found in Amplify. It is my understanding that NWESD's SMC will continue to support districts' individual needs as well as collective needs identified through the Co-op.

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