Teaching & Learning Resource Hub - Disciplinary Core Ideas

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Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCI)

Disciplinary Core Ideas

After teachers have gotten an introduction of the NGSS, a place that I like to start with is the Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCI) - the orange box. This box details all the facts that students are going to learn in their Life Science, Physical Science, and Earth and Space Science domains.

What teachers are comforted the most by is how little there is - largely so that they can spend the time this year to explore science the way it's meant to be explored and connect it to ideas both within the academic year or beyond.

For example, in this Kindergarten DCI, we see that the information that they need to know is that weather is a combination of sunlight, wind, snow or rain, and temperature in a particular region at a particular time.

People measure these conditions to describe and record the weather and to notice patterns over time.

The DCI Checklist Project

Navigating the standards, however, can be difficult. And so a project was established to create checklists that list ALL of the orange boxes within one single document for each grade level. You can think of it as a list of all the content you need to teach within your academic year.

Below you'll find links to each grade level's checklist. To use the checklist, please either print it out or make a copy that you can check off within your Google Account.