CCC/SEP Posters

Post date: Dec 17, 2016 1:9:31 AM

The Three Dimensions

In the CA NGSS, students need to do more than simply know about science; they need to know core science and engineering ideas, do science and engineering, and think like scientists and engineers. These are the three dimensions of NGSS (see the table below). 

Teaching the Dimensions Explicitly

How should we use the CCCs and SEPs?

• • Instruction: Let's say you are doing a lesson where you dissect a seed and notice it has a hard outer shell. One approach would be to have students label the parts of the seed on a diagram you give them, but that's not the best NGSS approach. Instead, we can ask our students, "How does the hard outer shell help the seed?" After students answer, we then explicitly draw attention to the CCCs: "Which CCC is this an example of?" In this case, the outer coating is a structure that protects the inside of the seed, so I would say "Structure and Function [CCC-6]." By drawing students' attention to this CCC, they will be more likely to think about how a different body part affects its behavior in the future. In other words, we are trying to train our students to think like scientists when they make these observations rather than to train them to simply remember and label things.

To help you and your students become more familiar with the CCCs some Pete A'hearn, a teacher from Palm Springs, developed posters that they put up around the room and point to all the time. I liked the idea and added some posters of my own for the SEPs. Download them here or at the bottom of this page and place them on the wall of your classroom or science lab! (The author of the CCC posters says that teachers can use them for their classrooms, so feel free to share but be sure to recognize him and comply with the 'educational' use requirement.)

For other ideas about how to use the CCCs and SEPs, scroll down and read more below the table.

• • Assessment: The SEPs give us ideas for what tasks students can engage in and the CCCs help us design rubrics to make sure that students have a rich understanding of what's going on. ("To see if students 'get it', I'll have them write an explanation [SEP-6]. Students that describe the cause and effect relationship [CCC-2] will get a higher score than those that just notice the pattern [CCC-1] without explaining how it gives a clue about cause and effect..")

  • Lesson Design: They can be a checklist to make our lessons more authentic science/engineering experiences. Example: Heidi from Plummer Elementary had her students do an amazing engineering activity building boats out of foil and straws. She made her activity more powerful by adding a pictorial model [SEP-2] where students drew their design and labeled each key design choice they made using the sentence frame, '(part) serves the purpose of ______', an expression of structure and function [CCC-6]. If students can't articulate why they made the structure the way that they did, they may just have been doing trial and error.