SCIENCE BRIEF
This section should be 2 pages in length. In it, summarize in your own words, and with your instructor in mind as the intended audience, the big ideas or concepts of science that are relevant for you as teacher to grasp and understanding fully in order to teach in an informed way.
Your brief should emphasize two things: (1) concepts and (2) practices or process skills. In this section, you will demonstrate that you yourself understand the science content underlying what you plan to teach. Be certain that your Science Brief is free of misconceptions about your topic.
Write your Science Brief in paragraph form, not as a series of bullets, with minimal use of quoted passages (those used must be cited). Do not describe the curriculum or its approaches here, nor your plans for how you will teach your learners, which writing in Section D, Lesson Plans.
Use high school textbooks, the web, and network with others to build this science understanding. Typically, this goes well beyond what you will be teaching to your young learners.
Your Science Brief should include:
(A) Science Content Knowledge (no less than 1 page of the minimum 1.5 pages, or two thirds of the brief), and describe all relevant big ideas of science and practices underlying the entire curriculum module, with emphasis on the lessons you taught. Also briefly describe how the curriculums learning goals are linked to learning objectives found in the NYC PK-8 Science Scope & Sequence 2018, or NRCs Framework (2012), or Next Generation Science Standards (2013).
(B) The intended grade level of your materials must be within two (2) grade levels of the standards chose.
(C) (B) Science Pedagogical Content Knowledge — Here you describe what you learned from published educational research that you found about (a) specific misconceptions regarding your science topics to which students are prone, (2) suggestions or remedies for how to help learners overcome those misconceptions, and (3) learning progressions that describe how students evolve in their understanding of an idea.
Only include this write-up when such educational research is available. In other words, resist the temptation to make up misconceptions that you think kids may have. Cite sources at the end of this section. For example, if you were writing about the Ice Cube homework task that we did in class, your write up of relevant science would provide full space for you to articulate your understanding of heat transfer and the three main methods convection, conduction and radiation. You would not just list these ideas but give space to articulate your understanding of these ideas, and how they apply to the task at hand. Since the main process skill in Ice Cube task is designing a fair-test experiment, you would also describe the three questions of inquiry and how you answered them in planning the Ice Cube experiment.
