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The prospective curriculum, which has been in development for three years, is a mix of teacher-created lesson plans, a curriculum called Mystery Science and science-themed segments of the district’s English language arts curriculum.
The curriculum review at Springfield School District office painted a colorful picture of what science lessons could look like in Springfield elementary classrooms.
Cardboard drawers containing ready-to-use kits were labeled with each lesson’s driving question. A second-grade lesson named “How can you stop a landslide?” included a bag of cornmeal, salt and cups.
The elementary English Language Arts workbook was close by, which teachers would use to supplement the hands-on activities with relevant readings and vocabulary. To draw it all together was the meticulously organized “curriculum map,” which shows a teacher how to sequence science and English lessons and how each lesson hits different science standards.
Dara Brennan, Springfield’s science teacher on special assignment, has been working on the curriculum for about three years, a process that has included some twists and turns. After a year of public scrutiny over the adequacy of Springfield’s current elementary science curriculum, the materials will be up for formal independent adoption by the Springfield Board of Education at its meeting Monday, May 11.
What to know about the curriculum
Brennan said the process of creating the curriculum started with finding all the science they could in the English language arts curriculum.
This was an approach that Whitney McKinley, director of teaching and learning, recently described as the decision of former superintendent Todd Hamilton. The thought at the time was that it would save money and time on another curriculum adoption after the district spent almost $5 million on the English language arts curriculum.
What the district didn’t factor in was the lack of hands-on activities in the language arts curriculum and, in grades three through five, a lack of alignment with science standards. Brennan began by involving teachers to find the science in the language arts curriculum and create mini science lessons to go along with the readings but this became “really time consuming and cumbersome,” she said.
Brennan then turned to the science materials that the district had: a brand of curriculum called Mystery Science. The online instructional materials have been available to teachers since 2017, she said, but teachers had to look for supplies for experiments and demonstrations.
The district bought the specific supplies Mystery Science sells to go along with the curriculum this year. Mystery Science isn’t on the state-approved science curriculum, but Brennan said it meets the state requirements in most categories, although she said district administrators want to improve the ways teachers test for comprehension.
Mystery Science has video and written tutorials for teachers that show step-by-step instructions for the hands-on activities. It also provides some print-out materials for students.
In the classroom, science will share time with social studies and art, Brennan said, but each grade will need to complete three units throughout the year. Third graders, for example, learn about weather and climate; forces, motion and magnets; and environments and life cycles. Brennan said students may study science every day for two weeks and then switch to a different subject. Length of units will vary.
“It would ebb and flow throughout the year, but there’s certainly time for what we’ve put out here for the teachers to follow,” she said.
During a science unit, students will also read texts during English language arts time that relate to the science activities they are working on, such as reading about Model-T cars when learning about forces and motion. Science and language arts won’t always be back to back during the day, but teachers can easily make sure students make the connection, Brennan said.
Brennan and curriculum coordinator Jeff Fuller did not give a specific number of minutes students will have science per day, but said school schedules are not changing. There is no state-required amount of minutes for science, only a suggestion of 45 minutes daily.
“I would argue that when we start allocating numbers of minutes to things, we start disintegrating our day,” Brennan said. “If we now have to have a certain number of minutes, we would need to expand our day, expand our year. What we’ve done has created a solution that fits in with the constraints that we have.”
Fuller said while the district has had some Mystery Science materials in the past, the expectations for how teachers should use them were not clear. The prospective curriculum materials will clarify expectations of how to use the materials during the allocated science time, he said.
Criticism about curriculum, time to teach
Whether Springfield has adequate elementary science instruction has been a point of dispute this year.
Teacher Mikell Harshbarger filed a complaint with the district 2½ years ago about Springfield’s lack of state-standards-aligned instructional materials for science and social studies and the lack of time in the day to teach the subjects. He eventually filed the complaint with the state in the summer of 2024.
The state’s investigation is still pending after multiple extensions. Its current deadline for completing its inquiry is Friday, May 15. Harshbarger’s complaint alleges that the district has been out of compliance since the last round of curriculum adoptions for science in 2017 and social studies in 2019.
The complaint eventually gained public attention. A former Springfield teacher created a Change.org petition demanding a “well-rounded education for K-5” that has 826 signatures. And board Chair Jonathan Light reached out to the state to inquire about the status of the curriculum investigation — and later lost his chair position for doing so after administrators said reaching out directly to the state was a “misuse of authority.”
In the meantime a district-funded investigation into the claims found the district was in state compliance with the science and social studies curriculum because they were actively working to develop curricula.
It is not clear whether the adoption of the new elementary science curriculum would affect the state investigation results, given that Harshbarger’s original complaint was about the district’s compliance reporting for the 2022-23 school year.
