At yesterday’s meeting, grade level teachers for science were planning instruction for the last quarter. We were using a set of common science standards. We’d like to do all of the standards in the picture below but, after discussion, we realized we can’t. We still have MAP testing, AIMSWEB testing, one more bout of PARCC testing and probably a few, random bubble tests used to collect math data, not including regular tests and quizzes.

In the end, we decided to discard Standard MS.ESS1-3. We simply must spend too much time testing to tackle this standard. It’s a good standard and understanding astronomical distances is likely to benefit students more than spending weeks of the remaining 42 days of the semester in testing. I don’t decide the schedule, though. I just help my groups decide what to drop while we attend our numerous meetings.