.png)
ChangED
ChangED is an educator based podcast for Pennsylvania teachers to learn more about the PA STEELS Standards and science in general. It is hosted by Andrew Kuhn and Patrice Semicek.
ChangED
3-D Learning: Using Math to Better Understand Science
What did you think of the episode? Send us a text!
Ever wondered about the discoveries lurking in the far reaches of our solar system? Ted Willard from Discovery Education joins us with tales from his extraordinary journey—from a high school physics teacher to a key player in the debate over Pluto's planetary status. With an impressive background in planetary science, Ted shares learnings from professor's discovery of Uranus’s rings. As we navigate through this cosmic conversation, Ted sheds light on the dynamic nature of scientific understanding and the way new evidence can reshape our educational models.
But it's not all planetary talk! Get ready to rethink science education with a focus on innovative teaching approaches that break away from traditional methods. We explore the Next Generation Science Standards alongside Pennsylvania's STEELS standards, bringing science to life through hands-on experiments like balloon-powered carts. We promise you'll come away with a new appreciation for three-dimensional learning, where practices, concepts, and ideas blend to create a lively, engaging classroom experience. And just for laughs, stick around for our humorous banter as we slip into the world of YouTube antics and chuckle over Andrew’s supposed wardrobe choices. Join us for an episode that's equal parts educational and entertaining!
Want more Ted? Attend one or all of his sessions at the 2025 NSTA Conference in Philly. Use the NSTA app and search for Ted Willard or the session titles below:
Selecting Phenomena to Motivate Student Sense-making
The NSTA Atlas of the Three Dimensions
Unpacking the Crosscutting Concepts with a new NSTA Quick-Reference Guide to the Three Dimensions
NSTA's Trilogy of Guides to the Three Dimensions
ChangED is the official podcast for the NSTA Philly Conference.
Experience more ChangED/NSTA podcasts and learn about the Philly NSTA Conference by visiting nsta.org/podcast.
Want to learn more about ChangED? Check out our website at: learn.mciu.org/changed
Welcome back.
Speaker 2:Welcome back. Welcome back to Change Ed.
Speaker 3:Changed, changed. We sound so excited to be here.
Speaker 2:I am as thrilled as you are that you tuned in to this episode of Change, Ed. I'm your host, Andrew Kuhn, Education Consultant. Ac from Montgomery County Intermediate Unit here with me.
Speaker 3:Patrice Semecek, also an EC from Montgomery County Intermediate Unit.
Speaker 1:And Tony Marabito from Carbon Lehigh Intermediate Unit, SDF.
Speaker 4:The IU is not Indiana University. I'm just kidding.
Speaker 3:No, yeah exactly.
Speaker 1:I'm not that important. Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 2:We are super thrilled and honored to have here with us Ted Willard with Discovery Education. Ted, welcome to the show, happy to be here. We know that you are a well-known individual, especially in the education and science worlds, but now that you've been on this podcast, look out, people are going to come up to you and want selfies.
Speaker 1:The following is going to follow you down.
Speaker 2:We are super excited to have you. If you don't mind, just introducing yourself to the ChangeEd Nation, so that we can know who it is that we are talking to today. Changeed Nation, so that we can know who it is that we are talking to today Absolutely Very happy to do that.
Speaker 4:I have a degree in planetary science. I was a high school physics teacher for a number of years. I got a job at Project 2061, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and basically spent 12 years there doing work around standards-based reform, and they were one of the organizations that was involved in the previous generation of science standards as opposed to the next generation of science standards. And then in 2012, around the time that Framework for K-12 Science came out, I got a job with the National Science Teaching Association as I was their sort of in-house standards expert from 2012 to the end of 2019 and basically sort of oversaw all of NSTA's work around implementation of NGSS or other standards based on the framework for K-12 science education. And then in 2019, I moved over here to Discovery Education where I've been designing standards based curriculum for K-12 students, mostly focused on middle school, but have been working, done work, all across the K-12 spectrum.
Speaker 2:So I'm really interested in the planetary science. Can you tell me about that? What is that? What do you study and what does that mean?
Speaker 4:Astronomy is technically stars, planetary science is technically planets, although I did a bit of both of those things and so basically trying to understand the planets. My advisor was famous in the astronomy community of sorts because his specialty was studying when a star is passing behind a planet, or a planet is passing in front of a star, and studying carefully the light from that star. So when I better be getting this right that it was uranus and not neptune, I think I'll be very embarrassed. When the star, the planet, passed by that star, there was these little dips in the amount of light, dip, dip, dip, and then a symmetrical dip, dip, dip on the other side, which led him to be the first person on the planet, as he was kind of analyzing this data, to realize that Uranus had rings, because those dips in the light were from the rings blocking the light from the star. That's amazing, wow.
Speaker 1:To be clear, ted Patrice and I knew that. We just wanted you to clarify for Andrew, that's very cool, thank, you for explaining it to him. That's great.
Speaker 2:Thank you, tony, for airing my dirty line. I appreciate you doing that. So the big question is is how many planets are there? Because I know we've gone back and forth in my lifetime as a student. We've gone back and forth. So now that we have a planetary expert with us, what is the answer and how are we clarifying planets?
Speaker 4:I actually now you know this was my biggest moment in the media prior to this podcast is that I actually, aaas, was contacted by Ed Week when there was this big change about the aspect of whether Pluto is a planet or not, and I get, and they they had me talk to the reporter and so there's a little. There's one little quote line from me in, in that the way I've said it then was the. The aspect of it is that planets and all these things are here are human labels we put on things. Nature isn't so nearly clear-cut, and so it's not surprising sometimes that it's hard to decide whether one thing is part of this group or that group. And you know, it's all just about of how we find things easy to categorize.
Speaker 4:Pluto is what Pluto is. It was a case of that. We figured out some things, that Pluto was a little bit different than we thought it was. We started to get to the point where we had some other bodies in the solar system that were bigger than Pluto and had a better claim to be a planet than Pluto did, and so somebody had to decide, a group had to decide do we want to start talking about there being 10, 11, 12 planets, or do we want to say Pluto isn't a planet?
Speaker 2:Okay, so this is your change-it exclusive. Ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker 3:Well, exclusive, ladies and gentlemen, that's right. Well, no, but I really like the bomb out there. I like how you explain that is that it's really pluto has always been what pluto has always been. It's the way in which we're categorizing it and the depth of our knowledge to understand more about it. Therefore, we're shifting our understanding. That's science, though. Right, like, exactly.
Speaker 2:Yep, I love that and to your point, whether, it being science, things don't always have to be what they've always been, so we are able to adjust and to make new informed decisions about things, and that might change a little bit. So I appreciate that as well.
Speaker 4:To connect into something I'm sure I will say later on and says when suddenly you have new evidence, it means that you sometimes need to adjust your model.
Speaker 2:Yes, and that's all we did with Pluto we adjusted our model Right and back to what you said, and by we I mean scientists.
Speaker 3:I had nothing to do with it, Right, clearly just me.
Speaker 2:I was the only one. Everybody else knew that, but when everybody else knew that. But to your point, pluto has not changed. Our perspective on Pluto has changed, got it? I love that.
Speaker 1:Can I ask a little about discovery In our work? We get to do a lot of curriculum work with schools. My focus recently has been a lot with elementary, but I like that you mentioned middle school and your design with curriculum. With the shift in our steel standards that we've been working with a lot here, where do you even begin with the whole? We were mentioning storylines prior to the podcast beginning, things like that. There's so much to take in and we love the shift here. We're very excited for it. But I couldn't even imagine taking on a task like this. So could you kind of walk us through your role and what you do and how you do it?
Speaker 4:It may not surprise you in some ways, in clinics and other things we're doing here, you start with the standards. What are my goals? If I, you know, if I need to think about, where do we get there? And the big piece is this aspect of phenomena, a real key aspect of student learning that this whole shift is all about is appreciating the idea that we want to get away from having students basically playing the game of school. You know, what am I doing in school? Well, I am basically figuring out what my teacher wants me to say and then saying it. I'm just going through the thing here. I'm practicing intellectual bulimia, where I take things in, I spit them out and I do not retain them.
Speaker 3:I love that phrase. I'm sorry I had to jump in. That is an awesome phrase. Can you say that again? They're practicing what?
Speaker 4:Intellectual bulimia, intellectual bulimia, wow can't, I can't take credit for that. I heard it actually from one of the people who was involved in developing the next generation science standards, but it's a guy named stephen pruitt, but I don't know where he got it from. Maybe he made it up himself, but no, I love it I'm pretty sure he listened to our show.
Speaker 2:I'm sure he heard it from here there we go, or they just basically don't care.
Speaker 4:You know, they've basically checked out altogether, you know, but we want to shift to them gaining knowledge, the way that scientists gain knowledge.
Speaker 4:And the way scientists gain knowledge is that they look at some phenomenon and they're like how the heck does that go on? And so what I try to do, what people who develop curriculum with me try to do is we try to think about what phenomena could we show students that they would not know how to explain what's going on there, but they would want to explain what's going on there, and the only way they're going to be able to explain it is if they learn the science ideas that I want them to learn. So we have in discovery education, a unit we developed called Rocket Sled, and because we're Discovery Education, we have this great aspect of having access to Mythbusters videos and there's this myth that they work in on Mythbusters. That was this idea that somewhere up in Minnesota or someplace there was a head-on collision between a snowplow and a car and the snowplow was not one of these, that just pushes the side, it was the right dividing it. And the idea that the car could have been split in half the triangle I saw that episode okay so.
Speaker 4:so they do this sort of myth here and then they find that, no, you can't do that, but because they're myth busters, they go and they find a way to do it, and that's what we focused on is what they did is they went down to New Mexico, to a place there that has rocket powered sleds, and they built a snowplow blade onto a rocket powered sled. That got it going at 600 miles an hour and it literally split a car in half. And so you show kids that video and you want them to now think about how the heck did they do that? How did they get it going that fast? Why was that able to split the car in half when the other thing wasn't able to split the car in half? And what do you have to learn about? Well, you, there's little things there. There's that you know that they didn't just have one rocket on that, there were nine rockets.
Speaker 4:Well, it turns out that the more force you apply to something, the more acceleration you get. And they didn't have a full fledged snowplow blade. They had made this really small one in some ways that was still in thin, because it turns out, the more mass you have, the less acceleration you get for a given force. And then why did it do so much damage to the car? Well, there's this concept called energy, kinetic energy, and the more kinetic energy an object has, the more damage it does. Kinetic energy depends upon math and it depends upon velocity, but it turns out it depends more on velocity than it does on mass. So getting something to go really fast is more important than having something that is really heavy.
Speaker 3:So, ted, how do you take something super exciting like that? They're into it, because who doesn't want to see a car explode? Right, like super exciting. But how do you take something like that and the concepts that you're talking about? How do you take that super great hook and do two things with it Extend the learning, but how do you also make it relevant to what they actually can do and understand in the classroom? Because we're not going to New Mexico to blow up cars with rockets.
Speaker 3:So how do we extend that thinking, and I think you're kind of one of the perfect people to talk to about this because of what you do for discovery, so do you mind walking us through? How do you take something awesome like that and make it relevant and real and continue the learning without kind of dampening their excitement?
Speaker 2:I'm going to give you a think time, not that you need it, but I would love to know what is your street cred at discovery ed Cause we want to have.
Speaker 3:Adam and Jamie on the show. So what is it? They're not really they don't work for discovery anymore, do they?
Speaker 4:They don't.
Speaker 3:And.
Speaker 4:I have no and I have no ability to.
Speaker 3:You have no street cred. Oh, ted, you know oh street cred.
Speaker 2:Oh, ted, all the lies have been fed about you, ted. This is all lies.
Speaker 4:I mean you guys are big names in Pennsylvania education. How well does that get you to get the most famous people in Pennsylvania, Some of the main baseball players.
Speaker 3:I mean, we've had some pretty stellar guests Ted. We've got some good people here.
Speaker 1:Saquon Barkley's on next week, so we'll go there.
Speaker 4:Now we've got to be careful. I'm a New York Giants fan.
Speaker 3:So this podcast might be over Ted your audio is breaking up, I heard you say no one wants to listen to me anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we just lost our entire.
Speaker 3:we're going to have to delete all that out, the algorithm is going to go. It's scrolling up and plummets, nope and we're done. Ted's never allowed back.
Speaker 4:So what was the question? No, so you have to think about these sort of things here, but it's basically working to scale down. No-transcript.
Speaker 3:balloon powered carts in the classroom so you're talking about all the same concept, you're building their understanding and you I love that.
Speaker 4:I love that, and in the balloon cards, we get to the aspect of, like what's pushing the carts, and that leads us into eventually newton's third law, that when the balloon pushes the air out of it, the air pushes the balloon cart and the balloon and the balloon cart forward. So we're able to get various ideas about Newton's third law playing from this rocket sled idea and, as I like to say, if I can get kids caring about why, about how does the rocket push the rocket sled, I'm getting kids to ultimately care about Newton's third law and as a former physics teacher, I can tell you getting kids to care about Newton's third law is not an easy thing to do.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can imagine.
Speaker 2:What I love.
Speaker 2:What you're describing is really the mindset as I see it, of NGSS and also of Steeles here in Pennsylvania, that we are flipping the script from going from micro and, once you passed all the flags, you get into the macro. We're starting macro and which is really actually where we can make it relevant to our students. Right, we're talking about things that you would actually care about and that now we're going to drill down to, like how does it actually work? So we're creating a space where they would be interested in the learning by flipping it and doing it the opposite of what we were doing yep, we are not telling students the science.
Speaker 4:That's back into the game, this game of school that I talked about. I know where I can say something to a student and that student can say it back to me. It does not mean that student understands that. You know, we can say things without understanding those things. We can know terms and even definitions for terms without really understanding terms, terms and even definitions for terms without really understanding terms. There's a great video I love to use in professional learning.
Speaker 4:That is from interviews of some Harvard and MIT students years ago being asked about here's a seed and here's a log or a tree. Where did the stuff come from? And these are students. I am sure could balance the equation for photosynthesis, could probably answer a lot of state tests about photosynthesis, but they can't tell you where that material came from that made up the tree. And in fact, if you suggest that carbon dioxide has something to do with where that material came from, they reject it at first. They think the seed oh, it came up from the roots of the plant. That's because that's what they think of as the first. They think the seed oh, it came up from the roots of the plant. That's because that's what they think of as the first. They basically give answers very similar to interviews with elementary students about this, because they learned in a way that basically maybe gave them some information, but it's inert information.
Speaker 4:And what the steel standards do, what three dimensional standards do, is it's about the science in use. It's about science is not just a body of knowledge, nor is it just a practice. It is the combination, but it's both of those things. I mean trying to talk about one without the other. Or actually, let me three-dimensionalize this. I love the idea that we talk about three dimensions because it's like trying to talk about volume, but only using length or only using width or only using depth. You need all three to have volume. If I only have practices, I have no depth. If I only have cross-cutting concepts, I I have no depth. If I only have core ideas, I have no depth. I mean, I'm sorry, I have no volume. So we need three dimensions. We need all three to make volume.
Speaker 3:That is the clearest way I have ever heard the three dimensions working together. It is so easy for elementary teachers and middle school teachers and everyone to grab on to. I love that. I'm stealing that too. Can I quote Ted Willard? Is that a Ted Willard quote?
Speaker 4:You can quote. That one is mine, that one is yours.
Speaker 3:Good, I'm going to take it and I'm going to run with it. I think that is super clear. Without one, you can't have the other.
Speaker 2:I also love that it ties into mathematical right, like you understand it from a different perspective and lens, and I think, something that when we started this podcast that's why we named it Change Ed, because it was what's good in science is not just good in science. These are good teaching practices across the board, and so this analogy allows us to explain it in multiple fashions.
Speaker 3:To say, here's how three-dimensional learning is good for all, and this is why and it goes back to the concept of we can't just focus on the dcis and the content we've really got. We really have to incorporate the scps and the cccs, or else it's not. It's just one dimension.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's really good the one thing I wrote down here, ted, when you, when you were saying this and I think it's actually really significant and important was that you were talking about the body of knowledge.
Speaker 2:And what actually really significant and important was that you were talking about the body of knowledge and what went to my mind is that, because the body of knowledge keeps growing and we're like, wait, these are important things that we need to know, these are important to your life. We talked about that idea of flipping it, but before we flipped it, it almost served as a second history lesson, where it was like you have to know all of these things that happened and we were focusing on what had happened. And what I love is that we're making it relevant learning, but almost flipping it to be like well, what, if, what if we could do this, and that's such a significant. It's a subtle but significant shift in our mindset to think about could this be possible? Versus well, it's already been proven that it's this, so that's not possible. And I think you're engaging the mind in a different way, to be like could I actually create a rocket-powered backpack that could get me to the moon?
Speaker 2:And then we're like okay, let's lean into that. Here's what we know. What would you need to be able to make that possible? And so, for me, it's flipping the script from what we can't do to what we could do, and that possibility and that mindset and that creative thinking and problem solving. So it's. It's we're ingraining inspiration into our students with this mindset of of you know, let's go big and then we work down to make it a possibility versus you know. A lot of times you can feel like, man, I'm looking at this huge elephant. Well, how do you eat an elephant? Bite by bite, right, then that's how we're going about it, versus the other way was like, well, the elephant's just too big. It feels like it's a framework for us to be able to move students through learning.
Speaker 4:Yeah, there's two things I think I want to sort of touch on from that.
Speaker 4:The first is that we're also giving students the gift of the aha moment, the eureka, that is so important, and it's not just the value in it of itself of just that nice feeling, it's the aspect of that stuff that sticks with you.
Speaker 4:I guarantee you that, for the three of you and for all the folks who are listening, you can think of some point in your educational journey. It may not have been in a classroom where something clicked for you, the light bulb went off, and two things about it. One is there's this how good that felt, which makes you want to do that sort of thing more. The other thing is is that when you figured it out, it stuck with you. You still know that thing that you figured out, whereas if I told you something and you were just and I handed it to you and you did no work for I told you something and you were just and I handed it to you and you did no work for it, you also don't really hold on to it in your brain. Very well, right it slides away pretty, pretty easily.
Speaker 4:Yep, well, I do want to pull one other piece about. That is the aspect of as, as andrew is kind of making reference there, it is impossible for anyone to learn everything about everything. Okay, there is a limit to how much content any one person can learn in a human lifespan, and there's more content out there than can be captured, more than we have time for in our classroom. Time is our most valuable resource. We talk about money as an issue, but time is the really most valuable resource in there.
Speaker 4:So another great thing about these standards that are based on the framework is trying to really think about what are the ideas that are most valuable to students as they go out in the world to work on. There are some ideas that just have some more value. The ideas of force and motion, the idea of energy, ideas about the particulate nature of matter, natural selection, understanding about cells, understanding about plate tectonics all of these different things here are powerful in some ways that they're generative, that they basically those ideas are very useful into developing new ideas, and those ideas are really valuable in a wide ranges of phenomena.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for coming. Make sure that you, ted, you tell the entire Discovery Education Network, and especially Adam and Jamie, about our show.
Speaker 3:Or maybe John Cena, because he did Shark Week this year. Oh, there you go.
Speaker 2:John yeah, look, you can name drop all you want, shaq, I think I did it at some point.
Speaker 3:I mean anybody, anybody, but for all listeners, the sharks. I'll talk to the sharks. I'll talk to the sharks.
Speaker 2:Listeners thank you for tuning in. Be sure to like, subscribe and share.
Speaker 3:Wow, like, subscribe and share, you got.
Speaker 2:I feel like a YouTuber right now. Alright, we'll do Chad and then we'll hang up the spurs.
Speaker 3:Hang up this purse.
Speaker 2:Spurs Hang up the spurs. What? Who's hanging up a purse? No one has a purse.
Speaker 3:Who hangs up spurs? When do you have spurs? It's the same. Are you from?
Speaker 2:Texas. Is it a Tony?
Speaker 1:Have you ever heard this? All I just learned was that Andrew wears assless chaps. That's what I just learned.
Speaker 3:And I'm so glad we're recording this.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, I also wanted to say to you B-roll, thank you.