STEM committee forms in Edwardsville School District

The Edwardsville (Ill.) School District has formed a committee to coordinate the district’s K-12 curriculum in STEM subjects, including science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, the Telegraph reports.

The committee will be made up of 18 teachers, administrators, college professors including Sharon Locke, and parents including Columbus Elementary School parent Scott Fitzgerald. Ms Locke is the director of the STEM Center at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, and has also served on several review panels for the US Education Department, the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Labor, and NASA. Mr Fitzgerald is a pilot for Southwest Airlines who has volunteered with teachers at the school on several STEM-related projects.

The purpose of the committeee, Superintendent Ed Hightower explained, is to build STEM-related projects into the curriculum across all grade levels. For example, a weather balloon project at Columbus Elementary might be extended to wind power projects in middle school and robotics projects in high school, he said.

“Projects like these give students the opportunity to work within groups to find answers to complex problems and to learn to communicate the results in a professional manner,” Mr Hightower told the Telegraph. “Our goal is to set up this initiative so it’s age-appropriate for our students, beginning in kindergarten, and we can vertically push up the curriculum so that when kids get to the high school, they are ready to take courses such as CSI.”

STEM has to be …

We believe STEM can entirely transform a classroom, a school, a cohort of kids, and so on. It’s the way of the world right now, but when Edwardsville’s students grow up, it will be even more essential. But in order to be transformative, it first must:

• Apply science and math to authentic experiences and open-ended exploration
• Emphasize the engineering design process (creativity)
• Promote engineering “habits of mind” (precision, consistency)
• Appeal equally to girls and boys
• Be available anywhere, anytime, preferably via the Internet

We reported about a month ago on a program in San Francisco that was aimed at making math classes relevant for students.

“A lot of times, students will say, ‘What good is this?'” one teacher was quoted as saying. Now that a new program is being put to use, when students ask what good it will do to study math, he said he plans to show them how Dow develops products for farmers who grow the food they eat in the cafeteria and at home. Then he’s going to have his students role-play, doing what process control operators do on the job, i.e., monitor the temperature, pressure, and flow rates of liquids through pipes and tanks.

In comes the calculus for advanced students, of course, but even middle schoolers can understand the idea of flow rates. And by getting kids into the driver’s seat, the programs naturally accommodate the “open-ended exploration” that is so necessary in kids’ learning. They learn by doing, and it doesn’t happen over the course of one lecture. This stuff takes time.

Other ideas for putting kids in control of the lesson’s direction were outlined this week on the New York Times learning network, here. The lesson plan provided shows how we can listen to students—which, we note, are completely unrepresented on Edwardsville’s committee—to develop the best teaching strategies to promote learning. After all, if classes are to be “open-ended” for the best learning to occur in STEM, why not make the committee’s direction a little more open-ended by including student membership?

In the Times, Salman Khan, creator of the world-famous Khan Academy, talks about STEM fields and education, bemoaning the lack of understanding the fields have for promoting creativity:

Despite the STEM subjects’ being about new ways of thinking and creating new things, many students don’t perceive them as creative. And that’s because, to a large degree, the type of filters we have for these subjects are actually filtering out our most creative people. If I had one wish in this area, it would be to see that creativity and invention became the central focus of STEM courses and that the traditional skills be viewed as what they are: tools to empower creativity.

In fact, some of the most creative people ever born work in STEM fields. Just because math has been around for thousands of years doesn’t mean new ways of applying mathematical concepts aren’t being developed all the time.

Creativity, some mistakes, more creativity, and then … learning

In a wonderful Edutopia blog post entitled “Creativity is the Secret Sauce in STEM,” science evangelist Ainissa Ramirez says humans are creative by nature, and I can tell you, kids are even more creative than adults. “Humans have a few basic needs: air, food, water, clothing, shelter, belonging, intimacy and Wi-Fi. … What might surprise you is that another primary need is the need to be creative,” she writes.

Kids need to create stuff, like weather balloons and rocket launchers already used in Edwardsville, in order to learn and reach their maximum potential. That doesn’t mean following a cookbook or any other kind of recipe; it means leaving them to their own devices now and then and letting them create their masterpieces.

And in this process, it becomes even more important to honor their forms of expression: social media, the emoticons and eight-letter abbreviations that only they know; maybe choosing the color for the rocket ship that they launch, painting pictures of horses on it, listening to their favorite music, and so on. Every time an adult tells a kid the “final answer,” as in, “It works best like this” or “Color is not important,” instead of providing options and letting kids decide—and possibly make mistakes from which they will learn, which is what school is for—we deprive kids of learning opportunities with which STEM subjects are replete.

In other words, as we reported back in June, there’s nothing wrong with teaching kids about global warming. It’s better, though, to let them explore nature and fall in love with the environment and the beauty in their world than to simply require them to recall on a multiple-choice test what effect carbon dioxide has on global temperatures. The latter is easy and quick, but the former is where real learning and excitement about STEM subjects hits home.

As appealing for girls as it is for boys

Finally, universities have noted the underrepresentation of women in STEM disciplines. Arizona State University says nearly 60 percent of undergraduate college students are female, while only about three in 10 of those women receive degrees in a STEM-related field.

Is that bad? The folks at ASU think it is: “The continued underrepresentation of women in STEM degree programs poses serious challenges to our nation’s economic future, democratic ideals and commitment to gender equality,” they write.

I think this problem is related to the perception of STEM fields as being non-creative. And unlike Mr Khan, I think that’s because teachers don’t feel comfortable enough with the material that they can allow students time for self-directed exploration. Honor the creativity of students, and both genders will come running to the sheer excitement of the STEM fields shortly thereafter.

This is no easy task, of course, but I think it sets a course direction forward while keeping the target in sight. If the goal is to increase STEM learning, especially by girls, consider bringing Barbie dolls as well as handsaws into the classroom, as they talked about at Arizona State. It’s a good strategy for a steering committee like the one forming at Edwardsville.