Creating NGSS Storylines

Step 1: Identify Your Scope

1a. Select Performance Expectations to target.
/ Shifts in NGSS
Organized around disciplinary core ideas (explanatory ideas)
Central role of scientific practices
Coherence: building and applying ideas across time
1a. Identify related Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCIs) / ...and related Cross-Cutting Concepts (CCCs).

Step 1b: Unpacking

1b. What are the sub-ideas & implicit understandings of the DCI(s) and CCC(s)?
1b. Identify boundaries for the sub-ideas (unnecessary details outside the scope of your unit).
1c. Students’ prior conceptions

Step 2: Candidate phenomena

2a. Brainstorm candidate phenomena (and related questions) that these ideas could be used to explain

Step 3: Articulating the Capstone PE(s)

3a & 3b. Reference the related NGSS PE(s), and then articulate an NGSS-style PE(s) for this unit (grounded in phenomena).
3c Create a desired/sample student response in a manner a student would generate it that shows they have met this/these PEs.

Step 4: Develop a Draft of Your Storyline

Questions
Does the question come from phenomena related to the driving question or from gaps in what we figured out so far?
Does the question ask how & why, and not just about facts? / Phenomena
Can you get students to buy into the question using this phenomenon?
Is there something about the phenomenon that needs to be explained? / Scientific Practices
What practices are they using to investigate and explain the phenomenon?
Will this lead to figuring out a piece of the DCI? / What We Figured Out
What part of the DCI will students be able to figure out?
What questions come out of the activity to motivate the next step?
What ideas do will have for next steps and future investigations?

Step 5: As You Narrow in on Lessons Rows, Revise your Storyline.

Questions / Phenomena / Scientific Practices / What We Figured Out
nextgenstorylines.org / This template is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/