What is “NGSS-Aligned”?
Picking Up Pandemic-Paused Pedagogical Priorities
Like many American schools, my school is NGSS-aligned. And like most of them, this is very much a work in progress.
When I first joined my school, four years ago, they were in the process of aligning the science curriculum to the NGSS standards. I think I joined in the third (or fourth?) year of that work. Much had happened. Much had not. We continued the work.
We continued the work until the middle of my second year (January of 2020), which was when the bottom fell out of the pandemic, and the life of my school changed substantially. Not as substantially as those schools who found themselves in places less well-suited for pandemic management than Singapore, but still quite substantially. As part of the new reality, the Administration of my school was unashamed in letting every teacher know that whatever they could do in the current moment was good enough. So many of the initiatives that my school pursues (and there are so many initiatives) were paused until further notice. I deliberately stopped thinking about NGSS for the time being.
Fortunately, the world is not a static place, and it is not 2020 (or 2021) anymore. I do not wish to suggest that the pandemic has evaporated, or that its impacts on my school will not continue for years, but we…
