Same Labs, Different Order: Unit Planning with the NGSS

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Hey, fellow science teachers.
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Welcome back to the lab bench.
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I'm Elise and this is episode two.
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Last episode was Philosophy, The Big Picture, My Origin Story, How I Got Here.
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Today we're switching to a practical episode.
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That means I'm giving you one thing you can actually use in your classroom.
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Not eventually, not after you've rebuilt your whole curriculum this week.
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Here's the promise by the end of this episode, you'll have one concrete strategy, a real classroom example, and something you can try before your next planning period is over.
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This is the labment, science education and filtering.
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I'm Elise.
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Let's get into it.
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Quick gut check.
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If the shift to NGSS has felt overwhelming, you're not alone.
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If you thought I don't have time to throw everything away and start over, also not alone.
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Good news, you don't have to start over.
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You already have everything you need.
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You just need to move it around.
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Let's talk about how most of us learn to build a unit in college because I think naming it out loud makes the problem obvious.
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Teach the content, do a lab that confirms the content, assign conclusion questions that ask students to connect the lab back to what you just taught them, and maybe a little bit further to a specific case study.
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That sequence made sense at the time.
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We thought students needed background knowledge before a lab would mean anything.
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But here's the problem with that.
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The lab answers a question that the students never asked.
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You already told them what's going to happen.
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The lab is just proof.
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There's no mystery left because you handed them the ending before the story even started.
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Students are really, really good at detecting when they're going through motions that don't actually matter.
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When there's nothing left to figure out, they check out.
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This isn't a small thing.
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This is the difference between students doing science and students performing science for a grade.
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So if the old sequence doesn't work, what replaces it?
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An anchoring phenomenon.
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And not every real world hook qualifies.
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A good one needs four things.
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One, observable.
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Students need to see it happen in person or in data.
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Not a definition, something that's actually happening in front of them.
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Two, genuinely puzzling.
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If students look at it and think, yeah, that makes sense, it's not puzzling enough.
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You want the wait what?
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Reaction.
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Three, explainable using the actual content of your unit.
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This is not a fun Friday activity you show once and forget about it.
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The content students learn should be the tool that lets them explain what they saw on day one.
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Four, connected to something real, not artificially real, actually real to your students in their world.
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Keep those four in your back pocket.
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And I'm about to tell you why they're important.
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Here's a phenomenon that hits all four, and it's one I use in my full year biology curriculum, specifically in biochemistry.
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There is a healthy baby that's born, and then within days, something is seriously wrong with the baby.
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Your student's job, figure out what's happening.
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First they diagnose the baby, and then the question becomes can we save the baby?
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Run this phenomena against the four criteria.
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It's observable through case details, it's genuinely puzzling because nobody hands them the diagnosis, only symptoms.
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It's explainable using enzyme biomolecule content that they haven't learned yet.
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And it's connected to something real because most of your students can imagine a sick baby a lot more easily than they can imagine caring about enzyme structure and function as a phrase on a slide.
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Students get invested fast.
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They love playing the role of a doctor.
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They want to know what's wrong with this baby.
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And that investment that your students have is doing the work for you before you've taught a single vocab word related to enzymes.
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So here's the flip.
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Before you teach anything about enzymes, give them your enzyme lab.
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I use a catalase lab with chicken liver.
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It's got a gross factor.
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I love it.
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Students love it.
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And you're going to vary the conditions of that catalase enzyme.
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So we use acid, we use bases, we boil it, we heat it up, we put it in ice water, and then we have a control at room temperature.
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Students are going to measure the bubbles that they see created when they mix the enzyme with hydrogen peroxide, and they record what they see.
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That's it.
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We're not doing vocab, we're not explaining why they're seeing what they're seeing.
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This is the moment that they start asking their own questions.
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Why did this one make more bubbles?
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Why did it make more bubbles faster?
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Why did this one not even work?
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Why did the boiling boiled one not do anything at all?
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Before any teaching happens, have students draw or write what they think is going on.
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No accuracy expected.
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The point isn't to be right, and this is going to be hard for your students.
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The point is to have a dated, concrete record of where they started in their understanding of what they're seeing.
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This does two things.
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It's a pre-assessment for you, and it's proof of growth for them later when they look back at what they wrote on day one and go, I can't believe I thought that.
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That moment when a student catches their own thinking changing, that is icing on the cake.
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That is beautiful.
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That is the learning moment that we live for as teachers.
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After the lab, have students write down the one question they most want answered about what they saw or about the phenomena that you presented to them.
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Capture them publicly: sticky notes, poster paper, or you can even use a digital Canva board.
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And before you have them share publicly, have them I like to say uh word vomit on their paper so that they have all the questions that they have.
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Have them pair up with a partner or even in a small group and have everyone talk about the questions they have, and then have each person within the group come up with their one.
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No repeats.
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That allows the filter of their classmates before they're sharing it out for the entire class.
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So once they do that, you'll see patterns.
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Some questions will repeat, some will surprise you, and these questions become the need-to-know list for the class.
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And that list is what tells you what to teach next.
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And it can also inform the order.
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But you are the teacher.
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If you want to teach it in a certain order, you can just pick and choose the questions and put them in the order that you want.
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But your students are dictating what you're teaching, maybe the order to some extent, and not necessarily your textbook, not a pacing guide that you got.
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It is your students' actual questions.
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And the board isn't going to go up once in the classroom and then be forgotten.
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It's going to stay visible somewhere in your room if you can, and then you can come back to it.
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If it can't stay visible in your room, take a picture of it.
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Put it on your learning management system.
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I use Canvas, but I know that's an option with other LMSs.
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Now to help you plan this out, because this is not a heavy, heavy lift.
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It is not as big as incorporating a brand new curriculum.
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I built a seven-phase planning framework to make this whole shift manageable, and I want to walk you through it.
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So if you haven't already, and I'll link it in the show notes, I have a free phenomenon-based unit planning template that you can download.
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Once you have it downloaded, come back and start playing the podcast from here.
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Now that you have it in front of you, you'll notice phases one through three are the real lift.
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This is where you're going to have to put in the most work.
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But once those are done, the rest follows naturally.
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So that's where I'm going to spend most of the time on this podcast today talking about.
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So phase one, you pick a phenomena.
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And you already know the four criteria from previously.
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So you can find a phenomena that fits for you.
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Phase two, front load the lab.
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You already know what lab you're going to use for whatever unit that you are teaching at the time.
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Phase three, identify your three dimensions.
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Okay, so this is the piece that makes the uh I flipped my lab thing actually NGSS aligned on paper and not just in spirit.
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For the enzyme unit, I'm going to take the NGSS standard and pull the science and engineering practices out of that standard.
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So for this particular unit, that standard is looking at modeling and constructing a CER.
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And the disciplinary core idea is also embedded in that standard, which is structure and function in an organism.
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And your cross-cutting concept from that standard is energy and matter.
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You're probably already teaching all three at some point in the unit.
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This phase just makes them explicit and puts language to what you're doing.
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Now, phases four through seven, quickly, because they follow once the first three are in place.
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Anticipate the questions your students are likely to ask.
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You can also wait until after your class compiles that driving question board if you're not sure what they might be asking.
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And then you can fill this in once that happens.
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Then you want to take those questions that they're asking and map your existing content.
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You're using your same note slides, note pages, the same videos that you've used to teach content to you're going to map those to the questions that your students are asking instead of going in chapter order.
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When you are mapping out the entire unit, you want to plan two to three points where the students go back to that initial model or drawing that they did.
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And you also will design a final assessment that loops back to the phenomena.
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You can probably reuse most of the current assessments that you have and just add a section that's specific to the phenomena that's asking them to do the science and engineering practices.
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Here's a model.
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Fix this model.
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Write me a CER.
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And all of this is related to the structure and function of enzymes and how that relates to energy and matter.
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That's the whole framework.
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I built this version of it while I was rewriting my own curriculum in my district.
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So I promise you that it holds up in any any science discipline in any classroom.
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I didn't invent this out of nowhere.
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The inquiry cycle underneath this whole structure comes from the NGSS website.
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And I specifically drew inspiration from Paul Anderson, aka Bozeman Science, his website, The Wonder of Science.
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He has an amazing poster up there that shows the inquiry cycle and where each of the science and engineering practices falls in that cycle.
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And that is how this entire unit planning template is set up.
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So if you've never been to his website, go bookmark it, thewonderofscience.com.
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I'll also put it in show notes.
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It has been the biggest source of inspiration and understanding for me with this shift to NGSS teaching and giving students more ownership over asking questions, deciding what they want to learn, what's important to them to learn, and also being a little more hands-off with investigative labs.
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So it's again, like I said, genuinely useful resource if you want to go deeper on anything related to NGSS, but specifically this phenomenon-based planning, because there is a page, and I'll link directly to this page in the uh show notes, that has phenomena aligned to every NGSS standard K through 12.
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So if you're struggling with a phenomena for a unit that you have, go to this website.
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It is a massive Google document, and there's multiple phenomena for each of the standards.
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If you want to use one phenomena for multiple standards, absolutely you can do that.
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That's what I do.
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So this is super valuable for deciding on what do you want to anchor your unit around?
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What real-world problem.
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So here's what I want to leave you with.
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You're not rebuilding from the ground up.
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You are rearranging what you already have.
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You have the same labs, you have the same content that you've used to teach for maybe for years.
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You're just putting it in a different order.
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That is the shift.
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Lab first, content, and then assessment.
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If you want this in writing, there's a post live right now on my website, keystonesciencepa.com, that walks you through this exact framework in more depth with a couple more classroom examples beyond the one I've shared here.
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Here's your one small doable action.
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Pick one unit, not the one you're doing right now, maybe one that you're going to do next or maybe two units from now.
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Fill in phase one and phase two only on the planning template.
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That's 10 minutes or less.
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Try the lab and the phenomena with real students before you plan the rest.
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You don't need to know your students' questions in advance.
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That's phase four, and it comes after you've actually run the lab.
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The seven phase planning template is free.
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The link is in the show notes.
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And if you're already on my email list, you've probably gotten it at some point from me.
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Follow the show wherever you're listening, and I'll see you next time.
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I'm Elise.
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This is the lab bench.
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Let's get to work.