Reflection: Individual Professional Responsibilities vs. Institutional Standards

A teacher wrote: “What is your logic in teaching high school biotech when this is not a direct standard or DCI. My department and I agree this is important. I feel this is a touchy "line."“

My response was off-the-cuff:

 If you and your dept think it's important, you can probably trust yourself to have the background to make a case for any NGSS std you want. Are you seeking matching phenomena/concepts or NGSS performance expectations? You could also try looking at HHMI for what NGSS standards they connect to their biotech topics.

Genuine curiosity question: What's the line here? What are you concerned about?

Personal view: I prefer to cover as many topics our students will encounter in *their* future, as difficult as it is to predict, through the lens of inferring from evidence & evaluating models (a main NGSS focus). The NGSS stds are basic guidelines, not the sum total of an HS science education. Whatever the science curriculum will be one day, Ss will be making the decisions about our world, regardless of whether we cover these technologies or not. Biotech is the future.

Standards: Most of these are covered in "HS. Inheritance and Variation of Traits" (LS1-4,LS3-1, LS3-2, LS3-3) and "HS. Natural Selection and Evolution" (LS4-1 thru 5) but it's great to use feedback loops from "Interdependent Relationships in Ecosystems" to talk about how these will aggregate in future population dynamics. Fun summative. Is this helpful?

Examples: For 9th grade heterogeneous Biology, I use these to discuss the increasing self-domestication of humans, adaptive eusociality and how classroom groupwork simulates cooperative strategies, biodiversity and the newest models for speciation, everything and anything about genetic diversity (including all possible human sex chromosome combinations, polymorphic traits, skin color, etc.).