Every Wednesday morning our school has a late start for the students and a morning staff meeting at 7:25am for everyone at the school to get together and discuss school goals, new district implementations, and allow for the same subject teachers to meet and look over assessments, test scores, individual, team, and personal objectives, etc. My middle school placement is in a 6^th grade science classroom. I’m not exactly sure how other middle schools design their curriculum but my middle school has each grade (6-8) focus on a specific science. 6^th graders focus on Earth and Space science, 7^th graders focus on life science (introduction to biology, and 8^th grade focuses on chemical and physical sciences. With NGSS becoming the expected curriculum to accompany science lessons and teachings the teachers who have been teaching this way for years were now forced to discuss whether they plan to spiral their curriculum or keep it segmented by grades and topics.

It was a difficult discussion to start at this meeting since the teachers were not expecting to be having this conversation. Should the spiral curriculum be their path of choice they must redesign their lessons, as the spiral curriculum would take place August 2015. This means that for teachers, like my cooperating teacher, who has participated in plenty of professional field development courses in earth science, has ample personal experience and stories to include for students, may have to swap many of those to include time for biology, chemical, and physical science introductions and basics at the 6^th grade level. It makes it even more difficult as three teachers need to decide by the end of the year, and not all 3 teachers share the same opinions on whether to go spiral or not.

My own opinions would be to spiral the curriculum slowly. Perhaps start in 6^th grade next year in order to get a grasp on how to implement the various units/topics, obtain resources for the teacher(s) to use, and 6^th graders have just entered the school so it would not effect the students in the upper grades, and by the time the 6^th graders who underwent a spiral curriculum moved onto 7^th grade, that would be the next spiral to occur. Additionally, I know that with the PARCC exam it will be testing on various areas of science, so 6^th-8^th grade will be expected to know more than just their grade focus at my middle school. This would benefit the students and would ease the spiral curriculum into the district without every teacher in science stressing over the redesigning phrase.

Ms. P