KnowAtom's Blog

The widely established 5E teaching sequence – which includes the progressive stages Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate – is helpful for informing the design of science programs, units, and lessons.

As helpful as it can be, the 5E instructional model is now more than 60 years old. What’s more, recent advances in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) have raised concerns over the model’s linear theory of learning.

This invites the question: Does the traditional 5E learning model support the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)? Or does the 5E model need adaptation to align with NGSS best practices?

In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about the 5E learning model, including:

• The 5E Model: What It Is and How It Works
• Advantages and Disadvantages of 5E Lesson Plans
• The 5E Model and Next Generation Science Standards

The widely established 5E teaching sequence – which includes the progressive stages Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate and Evaluate – is helpful for informing the design of science programs, units and lessons. However, it’s important to pose the question: Does their current incarnation actually work to support the Next Generation Science Standards and deepen STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) learning in our students, or does it require adaptation in order to best serve NGSS?

Much of the talk around the Next Generation Science Standards has focused on how science and engineering education will need to change to keep up with the new standards.

The next generation classroom environment needs to create this type of inquiry opportunity for the students to engage in the practices of science and engineering. Of key importance is the idea that their solution will be different from the solution created by the team next to them—and that it’s fine that they’re different. It’s all about giving students the individual opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of the practices and content.

The Next Generation Science Standards require a very specific kind of resources that allow students to achieve mastery of the standards.

Mastery means that students have developed skills and knowledge that they can take what they have learned and apply it to new scenarios and contexts, which allows them to tackle any problem or question, rather than just predetermined ones.

Because of this shift, it is important to understand that not all curriculum and resources create mastery readiness because not all resources prepare students to think critically and develop transferable skills.

In general, curriculum and resources can be categorized into four levels relating to their ability to create "readiness."

The STEM cycle explains why all students must be exposed to STEM: because STEM skills are life skills. Locked in the STEM cycle are the seeds of critical thinking—creative, evaluative, and analytical thinking skills that are transferrable and that make students trainable. These skills are the key to workforce  development and the underpinnings of a student’s future college and career opportunities.

According to the National  Research  Council’s  2011  definition of effective STEM instruction (a definition that helped lay the foundation of what would become the Next Generation Science Standards), "Effective STEM instruction capitalizes on students’ early interests and experiences, identifies and builds on what  they  know, and provides them with experiences to engage them in the practices of science and sustain their interest."

Because of the Next Generation Science Standards, the classroom experience is moving away from the traditional models of remembering, understanding and applying information. Memorizing information, like that there are solids, liquids and gasses, won’t cut it anymore. The idea that we know this rock is sedimentary because it has layers isn’t enough. What is going to move students forward is being able to use that knowledge to analyze a situation, evaluate a problem or create something.

There are a number of crossovers between Next Generation Science Standards and Common Core math, art and ELA practices. Here are a few real-world examples of each.

Before NGSS, you may have used textbooks, etexts, or otherwise taken a content approach centering on understanding and applying. What the new Next Generation Science Standards ask is that we go further in challenging student's higher order thinking skills: creating, evaluating and analyzing, so that students are not only consuming the content but are actually participating and interacting with it, working to develop it as a solution to a problem or answer to a question of their own within the classroom.

Understanding the relationship between the core components in the STEM cycle is very helpful to understanding—and applying—the three dimensions: practices, disciplinary core ideas, and crosscutting concepts that we find within the Next Generation Science Standards.

It’s a question a lot of educators have: At their core, what are the Next Generation Science Standards all about? Why do they exist? Why do we even need to consider changing our approach and methods?

When student questions and connections drive teaching and learning, you immediately have a much richer context in which students can learn. When they observe real-world anchor phenomena and are then given the opportunity to explore them through more individualized investigative phenomena, you have dramatically increased the chances that they will forge those valuable concept to concept, concept to self, concept to world connections.

Let’s talk briefly about next generation state-level assessment and how it should impact your use of phenomena and your approach to science instruction as a whole.

A lesson is a group of experiences. Each lesson represents deliberate practice, a deliberate thoughtful experience that comes together in the following way. Think about a lesson taking place in a middle school, for example, over the course of five days, meeting with students for 45 minutes at a time. On the first day, you might use a read-aloud, a visual or some other kind of media that brings that anchor phenomenon to life. Students encounter the anchor phenomenon – the flooding in New York City, for instance – within the context of this piece of media.