Disciplinary Core Ideas
How to Incorporate Disciplinary Core Ideas.
This Dimension is by far the easiest to implement. The DCI you are working with is the content you are teaching. The DCIs are the main concepts in Earth and Space, Physical and Life sciences. I think most science teachers are comfortable in this area because it is the knowledge that science teachers have.
The struggles arise when teachers become too broad in their teaching and they can not focus on content specifically related to the main idea. Many standards are related and many concepts are related. It is crucial to show students how they are related, while at the same time focusing on one concept in particular. According to SBG, we can only grade based on one standard at a time.
I think another issue is that teachers are not sure how the 3 dimensions truly fit together.
Disciplinary Core Idea is what students need to understand
Science and Engineering Practices are how students will gain that understanding.
Crosscutting Concepts are the connections students should be able to make with that particular concept.
Performance Tasks are the three dimensions put together to say what students should be able to do by the end of the unit.
This information was all I was given and told you can gain this information just by reading through the NGSS website. But I was unsure how this fits together in my actual teaching practice day to day. So I came up with the idea to combine the three Dimensions with my teaching style. If you need more assistance with this click on 3-dimensional teaching.
The last issue I see here is teachers are stuck teaching content how they were taught. Teachers want to cover very specific information about the standard in a way that they most likely learned about it. For example, in learning about chemistry and specifically atoms, many people were told to memorize the periodic table and various facts about each atom. Another example is when learning about a specific theory/law, students are taught the history of who, when, and what the theory/law states. Then give a small example of this theory or law. This leads to students needing to memorize a massive amount of information while being unsure of what they need to memorize. Teachers will often compensate, by specifying important information in some way. I used to highlight specific notes in my lectures. Then students feel like they are not good at science and begin to disconnect. This also leads to only showing students old white men whose ideas were accepted by society at the time and leaves out all of the women and people of color who made similar discoveries or helped the scientist we give credit to.
Instead, I teach the application of these topics. When students develop questions like "Do aliens exist?", then learn about exoplanets, goldilocks zones, and the application of Kepler's laws. Or a question like "How can we cook food faster?" can be directly related to affecting the speed of a chemical reaction, and kinetic theory. At no time though do students need to know about Kepler, or when the kinetic theory was developed. They need to understand how these ideas apply to their lives and interests. Start with their questions about science, and then relate those questions to your specific units, or standards. Students will maintain interest for much longer if they have a true interest in their own questions, rather than being forced to learn about a specific topic chosen by the teacher. It can also allow for true individual learning as each student has their own questions, and can learn the variations of how the same topic applies to all of these different situations.
Clarification point the standard sets the limit of information that students should know, some teachers call this a ceiling. Other teachers argue that this information should be on the floor, and many teachers want to dive into more and more detailed areas. I would suggest staying away from this unless this is an advanced/college course. General students do not need any more in-depth content, and many would struggle to understand since many struggles to understand the basic concepts. You could use more in-depth content areas for enrichment if you would like, but I prefer showing students how the same information can apply in different ways and letting the enrichment come from connections in understanding.