KnowAtom's Blog

What Does a Successful K12 NGSS Implementation Look Like?

Nov 28, 2018 by Sara Goodman

Fully implementing the Next Generation Science Standards is a growth process. Once you actually have a program that is thoughtful and well developed, it will take three to five years to get to a fully successful and effective implementation.

A quote that resonates when thinking about teaching and learning with the Next Generation Science Standards comes from Angela Duckworth in her book Grit: “Novelty for the beginner comes in one form and novelty for the expert in another. For the beginner, novelty is anything that hasn’t been encountered before. For the expert, novelty is a nuance.”

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Topics: School Climate and Culture, Implementing New Science Standards, Next Generation Leadership, Next Generation Science Classroom Instruction, STEM Education Policy, Three-Dimensional Learning

How to Combat Churn When Implementing NGSS

Sep 21, 2017 by Nicole Lanoue

Every year, teachers move. Sometimes they move within their schools to teach a different grade or subject matter, and sometimes they change schools entirely.

Called churn, this is a very real issue in public schools. This is common with both administrators and teachers, and it affects both the speed of implementation and student achievement levels.

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Topics: Next Generation Science Standards, School Climate and Culture, Implementing New Science Standards

How Closed-Loop Communication Helps Teaching and Learning Science

Feb 24, 2016 by Francis Vigeant

Communication is the No. 1 place leaders lose focus and buy-in. Being clear, consistent and open is a must. 

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Topics: Next Generation Science Standards, School Climate and Culture

How to Avoid the Public Backlash with NGSS that Happened With Common Core

Feb 3, 2016 by Francis Vigeant

There has been a lot of negativity surrounding the Common Core State Standards, I would argue much of which results from the ways in which communities learned about them, rather than their actual worth. 

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Topics: Next Generation Science Standards, Common Core Standards, Policy, School Climate and Culture

Communication in School Tribal Cultures

Feb 2, 2016 by Francis Vigeant

This post is the third post in a leadership series about the connection between the tribes that make up any school or district and the ability to make meaningful changes to create a next generation learning environment. The first post explored why understanding tribal leadership can help school leaders make the shift to the Next Generation Science Standards, and the second post explored the five tribes in the context of an educational environment.

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Topics: Tribal Leadership, School Climate and Culture

An Introduction to Tribal Leadership, Part 2

Jan 31, 2016 by Francis Vigeant

 

In Part 1 of this series, we wrote about how the concept of tribal leadership, from the book Tribal Leadership, can help school leaders looking to implement the Next Generation Science Standards. (If you missed the first post, click here.)

According to the authors of that book, we are all members of several tribes. We may belong to a political tribe that favors one party or another. We may be a member of another tribe defined by its religious belief, it's preference for a particular sports team or one's chosen profession—soldier, factory worker, teacher, or lawyer. Tribes form naturally around ideas and values. They have a central culture, ideas, and values in common.

Within a school building, there might be one tribe or multiple tribes. The researchers defined a tribe as being between about 10 to around 150 people, made up of like-minded people with shared values. Every tribe has a dominant culture, which falls on a scale of one to five. Each of the five stages has overarching views of the world and speaks a common language.

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Topics: Tribal Leadership, School Climate and Culture

An Introduction to Tribal Leadership, Part 1

Jan 31, 2016 by Francis Vigeant

In 2008, Dave Logan and John King published the book, “Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization.” This book summarized their research into the different “tribes” that make up every organization, and described how leaders can “assess, identify, and upgrade their tribes’ cultures, one stage at a time.”

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Topics: Tribal Leadership, School Climate and Culture

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