Between 2018 and 2021, Washington State Regional Science Coordinators and a tea of dedicated middle school science teachers engaged in field testing OpenSciEd instructional units to help inform the development of a complete Grades 6-8 open educational resource (OER). Field testing ended in Spring of 2021, and by February of 2022, all 18 units should be fully released! As individual units are released from development into general use, they have been reviewed by the NextGenScience.org peer review panel. All of them have received a rating of excellence, and the overwhelming majority of them have received the NGSS Design Badge: making them as exemplars of unit design.
Since the field test phase has ended, Regional Science Coordinators have supported teachers in using these units through science materials centers, asynchronous learning opportunities, and synchronous trainings. The newest way to support teachers that has begun is an OpenSciEd Community of Practice, where science coordinators and teachers leaders facilitate teachers learning more about the instructional materials and in supporting each other in implementing it.
With continued support from ClimeTime and the Williams Foundation, we now have middle school teachers in every AESD region of the state who are using OpenSciEd, and we are growing our capacity to train and support more teachers as they try the OpenSciEd materials!
