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Mr. Scribe outlines McGuffey SD's draft science curriculum aligned to STIEL standards
Summary
At a June 20 committee meeting, Mr. Scribe presented draft course documents for grades 6'12 aligned to the new STIEL standards, described a shift to phenomenon-based instruction and unit-level Google Sheets, and said environmental science remained incomplete while the curriculum will be piloted and revised.
Mr. Scribe presented the district's draft course-level science curriculum for grades 6 through 12 at the June 20 meeting, saying the documents map state STIEL (Science, Technology, Engineering and Environmental Literacy) standards to course units and classroom practice. "These are the course overviews and each unit is a tab in a Google Sheet," he said, explaining how the four-digit STIEL code reflects content area, discipline, grade band and individual skill.
He told the board the new standards emphasize student investigation of phenomena rather than solely teacher-directed lessons. "It's giving the students a lot more of the opportunity to experience a phenomenon ' whether that be through a video or through a lab activity ' and then having them develop the information about that idea," Mr. Scribe said, adding that teachers who piloted the approach reported better engagement.
As an example of the phenomenon-based approach, Mr. Scribe described a case-study unit on the 1982 Chicago Tylenol poisonings that the curriculum uses in a cell-respiration module to link chemistry and biology. "That seemed to work really well because it gave them a reason to want to learn the information," he said.
The course documents include estimated durations, the standards addressed, cross-cutting concepts and the engineering and science practices students should develop. Mr. Scribe said environmental science units were still being completed and that the team expects to continue fleshing out daily lessons over the coming months. He said the new state standards will be officially online "not this coming school year, but the one after," and that, according to a colleague, the comprehensive review for grades 6'12 is expected in "28 to 29" as part of the regular cycle.
Materials are organized in Google Sheets with a course overview tab and unit tabs; Mr. Scribe directed board members to the district website under Administration '1 Curriculum and Instruction '1 Science to find the links and a QR code to the curriculum resources. He said the science team asked teachers who teach specific courses to write the curriculum for those courses, and that the district will monitor and revise the documents as teachers pilot lessons.
The presentation closed with board members thanking the science team for the work; Mr. Scribe said the next steps are classroom testing, revisions based on teacher feedback and continued completion of outstanding units, notably environmental science.
