Standards

NGSS Expands Science Peer Review Panel

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 03/21/18

Achieve, a non-profit that focuses on college and career readiness, has announced new members of its Science Peer Review Panel. The additions will help the organization to expand its work evaluating lesson sequences and units designed for the Next Generation Science Standards and sharing high-quality examples online. Participants will receive ample professional development as part of their new roles.

Three-hundred people applied for the jobs. Those chosen will join a group of 38 other educators on the panel. Over half have identified engineering as an area of content experience, a high-need area for the focus of the Science panel's work, and about half of the new peer reviewers have spent more than a decade as classroom teachers.

Throughout the year members of the 51-person panel will receive free and "meaningful" professional learning experiences, delivered by experts in the field and designed to deepen their understanding of NGSS and the EQuIP Rubric for Science evaluation process for instructional materials. The EQuIP rubric is intended to identify the best examples of curriculum taken from free and publicly available materials and posting them for open access by the education community.

"When teachers have solid high-quality examples to try, they know what an NGSS-aligned curriculum looks and feels like, which helps them have more confidence to create their own units or lessons," tweeted new panelist, Holly Hereau, science department chair at Thurston High School, in Redford, MI.

The complete list of panelists is published on the NGSS website.