COVID and the NGSS
Mr. Evans taught physics, chemistry, and advanced chemistry at a large, urban high school in Kentucky during the 2019–2020 school year. As COVID became more widespread, students in his classes began asking questions about the virus. Therefore, before his school closed, Mr. Evans devoted instructional time to addressing their questions. As he said:
There were so many questions about it. My students did have so many questions. I felt like it was important to at least have more like a Q&A kind of a discussion before we closed down. . . . I wanted to get their ideas and kind of try and figure out what they were understanding and how they were kind of feeling about it.
However, given the limited, conflicting, and quickly changing information about COVID, Mr. Evans spent a great deal of time seeking out reputable sources of information. As he said:
At that time, I was just kind of a little bit crazy obsessive about trying to figure out what was going on with it because the students had had so many questions. So anything that I could read about it and try to verify information, and pull multiple sources where possible, because there was a lot of conflicting stuff at that time. . . . I don’t know when along the process it was, but Dr. Fauci kind of was coming through, and he kind of emerged as someone I was like, “Okay, that guy seems to know what he’s talking about and uses scientific language and evidence when he talks.” I started paying more attention to what he was saying, but at first, I didn’t know who to trust or what to try to believe.
Although COVID wasn’t well aligned to his content standards, Mr. Evans also used the virus as a way to teach his students about science practices and the nature of science. He explained:
We don’t have any specific COVID or disease-oriented standards for our disciplinary core ideas, but for the [Next Generation Science Standards] stuff, a lot of it is integrating the practices and the cross-cutting concepts. And so really, you’re talking about scientific practices. So we were talking a lot about social distancing and then models along with that. Just the process of science itself. Like why is there so much confusion and misunderstanding around the virus at that time. So a lot of it was related back to really core questions about the nature of science, which is in our standards. It was a very unique application of that I would say.
When his school eventually closed, Mr. Evans’ instruction moved online and became largely asynchronous. However, he still provided opportunities for students to learn about COVID via choice-board assignments. In his words:
The method that I chose to share information and do their assignments was called an agency board or choice board. . . . Like there were 10 assignments on it, and they got to choose five of them in the course of one week. . . . And so one of the boards that I did, the very first board I did, was just about COVID stuff. And so I would pull resources from online. There was a model that I think the Washington Post or somebody had posted, and there was an article about it, but it was like the spread of COVID with social distancing and without social distancing. And you can kind of see the growth of that over time. So I was asking them questions about modeling in science. And then there were some [assignments] just about the spread of disease in general and kind of relating that to globalization. . . . So a lot of it was sharing resources and just having them reflect on that information.
However, over time, Mr. Evans noticed that students became less interested in engaging with the topic, likely due to the overwhelming amount of information that they frequently encountered. He said:
I felt like . . . as it kind of went on, they were feeling a little bit inundated with information and with discussions about COVID. A lot of them just didn’t want to talk about it anymore at all. Kind of got to that point where it just wasn’t useful anymore to them.