I'm Jeffrey Mann, founder of Syzygy Science.

Syzygy didn't start as a curriculum company. It started in rooms full of teachers.

When districts were first making sense of NGSS, I worked directly with schools and educational organizations to help them through it. Workshops, conferences, video training, and curriculum for programs that need science to work in classrooms and field settings alike. The work was about translation: taking standards off the page and making them feel teachable.

In 2020, that work shifted toward curriculum design. And the more I wrote, the more something started bothering me. Most lab experiences were built around a predetermined answer. Students were doing "inquiry," but the path was narrow, and the ending was already written. Standards were met. Boxes were checked. But the intellectual work was not honest.

That realization led to a question: What does it look like to design for real inquiry, not the performance of it?

The answer became the Syzygy Cluster Design Process. It is an eight-step design framework that separates open inquiry from standards-based assessment and makes Science Pantomime structurally impossible. It is grounded in NGSS, built around the three-dimensional integration the standards demand, and designed so that genuine student reasoning is the only path forward.

You can explore the framework at The Framework.