Teaching STEM For Dummies E-Book

Andrew Zimmerman Jones

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 487

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Spark a passion for STEM

Teaching STEM For Dummies is an easy-to-read and exciting new guide for teachers who want to inspire their students with engaging lessons and thoughtful discussions about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. This practical roadmap to developing hands-on classroom material relevant to the real world shows you how to define STEM topics and overcome the most common challenges to teaching these complex subjects to younger students.

You'll learn how you can make STEM more welcoming—using inclusion, scaffolding, and differentiation—and discover resources for STEM teachers you can deploy immediately in your classroom.

Inside the book:

• Understand the STEM concepts students are expected to learn at different grades and how to connect those ideas together in engaging lessons
• Teach your students the inquisitive mindsets, logical reasoning, and collaboration skills they'll need to succeed in STEM fields
• Increase STEM inclusivity in both the classroom and the industry by engaging all students in STEM from early ages
• Discover resources to educate students on the problem-solving concepts at the core of STEM subjects

Perfect for teachers, homeschooling parents, tutors, and other educators, Teaching STEM For Dummies is a can't-miss read for anyone who wants to open young minds to the wonders of STEM.

Leseprobe

Teaching STEM For Dummies®

To view this book's Cheat Sheet, simply go to www.dummies.com and search for “Teaching STEM For Dummies Cheat Sheet” in the Search box.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

About This Book

Foolish Assumptions

Icons Used in This Book

Beyond the Book

Where to Go from Here

Part 1: Getting Started with Teaching STEM

Chapter 1: The Nuts and Bolts of STEM Education

Thinking about the Meaning of STEM

Helping Students Acquire Necessary Skills

Embracing the Challenge (and Promise) of STEM Education

Throwing Out the Old Rulebook

Chapter 2: What STEM Is (and Why It Matters)

Describing Core STEM Concepts

Adopting the Major Principles of STEM Education

Reaping the Benefits of STEM

Chapter 3: Teaching STEM, Then and Now

Casting a Brief Look Back at U.S. STEM Education

Digging into National Science and Engineering Standards

Exploring Math and Computer Science Standards

Part 2: Gathering the Building Blocks of STEM

Chapter 4: Understanding the World with Science

Splitting Science into Buckets

Studying Matter and Energy

Getting to Know Living Things

Exploring the Planets (Including Earth) and Outer Space

Some Brief Thoughts on the Scientific Method

Mixing the Buckets Together

Chapter 5: Leveraging Computing and Technology Tools

Exploring Technology in the Classroom

Living and Learning in a Digital World

Coding and Computer Science

Incorporating Day-to-Day Technology

Preparing for the Future

Chapter 6: Encompassing Engineering Solutions

Centering Innovation and Invention

Engaging the Engineering Design Process

Focusing on Engineering Design Process Steps

Other Approaches to Engineering and Design Cycles

Physical Programming: Coding Meets Engineering

Chapter 7: Crunching the Numbers with Mathematics

Thinking About Why We Learn Math

Knowing that Kids Will Use Math in the Future

Illuminating What We Talk About When We Talk About Math

Chapter 8: Mixing It Up: Integrating STEM Components

Combining STEM Areas

Reading, Writing, and STEM

Media Literacy as STEM

Promoting Justice for All: STEM and Society

STEAMing Up the Arts with STEM

Part 3: Employing Approaches to STEM Education

Chapter 9: Engaging Student Minds in a STEM Lesson

Unpacking the Learning Brain

Inspiring a STEM Lesson

Studying Up on STEM Teaching

Getting Students to Ask Questions

Embracing Collaboration and Student Roles

Chapter 10: Designing a STEM Curriculum

Focusing on the Standards Through a New Lens

Setting the Scope, Sequence, and Pacing

Revising and Iterating Your Curriculum

Chapter 11: Measuring and Assessing STEM

Knowing (and Assessing) What You’re Trying to Teach

Offering Formative Assessment as Feedback

The Hard Skills: Assessing Content Knowledge

The Soft Skills: Assessing Collaboration and Employability Skills

Trust the Experts: Students Evaluating Students

Chapter 12: Taking STEM to the Next Level

Letting Student Inquiry Lead the Way

Learning Through Play

Encouraging the STEM Hobbyist

Part 4: Troubleshooting STEM Education

Chapter 13: Planning the STEM Classroom

Evaluating Your STEM Resources

Considering the Little Ones and the Big Ones

Preparing STEM Educational Teams

Chapter 14: STEM at Home (and Homeschool)

Personalizing Learning Goals

Expanding Beyond Just Study Time

Bonding over STEM Game Nights

Chapter 15: STEM for All

Being a Voice for the Underrepresented

Surveying Traditional STEM Barriers

Incorporating Universal Design and Personalized Instruction

Part 5: The Part of Tens

Chapter 16: Ten STEM Lessons with Minimal Prep

Providing Free Build Time

Accessing an Hour of Code

Designing Storage Solutions

Making a Parachute

Setting Up a Tallest Tower Competition

Designing a Contraption

Making Oobleck

Building a Catapult

Conducting a Remote Control Race

Making an Egg Drop Challenge

Chapter 17: Ten Key Resources for Every STEM Teacher

Finding Online Interactive Simulations

Accessing Coding Platforms

Using Government Websites

Using Open Education Resources

Working with “Trash” STEM Building Supplies

Discovering University, Nonprofit, and Corporate Websites

Using the Calculator Application

Finding Digital Editing Suites and Resources

Locating Tinkercad and 3D Printing Websites

Looking for Citizen Science Communities and Resources

Index

About the Author

Connect with Dummies

End User License Agreement

List of Tables

Chapter 3

TABLE 3-1 Physical Sciences Core and Component Ideas

TABLE 3-2 Life Sciences Core and Component Ideas

TABLE 3-3 Earth and Space Sciences Core and Component Ideas

TABLE 3-4 Engineering, Technology, and Application of Science Core and Component...

TABLE 3-5 Mathematics Domains for Kindergarten through 8th Grade

TABLE 3-6 Computer Science Core Concepts and Subconcepts

Chapter 4

TABLE 4-1 Three Spheres of Activity for Scientists and Engineers

Chapter 6

TABLE 6-1 Six Simple Machines in Mechanical Systems

Chapter 9

TABLE 9-1 Inspiration for STEM Lessons

TABLE 9-2 Student and Teacher Roles during Different Stages of the POE Model

List of Illustrations

Chapter 2

FIGURE 2-1: Connecting ideas simply but impactfully.

Chapter 3

FIGURE 3-1: The structure of a standard in the NGSS, focusing on a performance ...

Chapter 5

FIGURE 5-1: A screen capture showing a Repeat block from the Scratch coding lan...

Chapter 6

FIGURE 6-1: This example of the engineering design process shows how to move th...

FIGURE 6-2: The steps of the Core Design Loop.

FIGURE 6-3: The micro:bit version 2.0 microcontroller (left) and the Arduino Un...

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Begin Reading

Index

About the Author

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Teaching STEM For Dummies®

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2025934644

ISBN 978-1-394-31346-4 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-394-31348-8 (ePDF); ISBN 978-1-394-31347-1 (epub)

Introduction

What would the world look like without global shipping logistics, telecommunications, world financial markets, the pharmaceutical industry, and streaming videos of unlikely pet friendships set to upbeat music? Some might argue that it would be a better world, but it wouldn’t be our world. The modern world relies on scientific discoveries applied through technological feats of engineering implemented with immense levels of numerical precision. In other words, it relies on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, otherwise known as STEM, working together.

A world that hangs together on those disciplines should also prioritize educational approaches and policies that teach them. Around the world, educators are discovering that their students are far more advanced than they are in some of these STEM areas, and woefully behind in others. Students who bypass the school’s internet security with ease may go on to fail tests that cover basic math skills.

Engaging students with STEM lessons that motivate deep learning is an imperative to bridge these gaps. Teachers must meet the students where they are and lead them to where they need to be. Giving teachers the tools they need to accomplish this mission is the goal of this book. And so, Teaching STEM For Dummies takes on the mission of informing you about teaching STEM disciplines.

About This Book

This book serves as an accessible guide for teaching STEM subjects, primarily through classrooms or formal lessons. Here are a couple of things to watch out for in the book:

Source material is summarized.

Though the solutions offered throughout this book are based on the latest scholarship in the science of STEM learning, I focus on clearly summarizing research results and implications rather than quoting researchers directly or citing numerous individual sources. In cases where a single, definitive text on a subject exists, I provide information on that source and, if possible, a link to access it for free.

Web addresses appear in monofont.

If you’re reading a digital version of this book on a device connected to the internet, note that you can click the web address — like this one:

www.dummies.com

— to visit that website.

To make the content of this book more accessible, I’ve divided it into five parts.

Part 1

: Getting Started with Teaching STEM.

This part of the book gives a broad overview of STEM education and teaching, including definitions, overviews of the content, and key concepts. I also cover the reason why teaching STEM is so important and the history of STEM education in the United States.

Part 2

: Gathering the Building Blocks of STEM.

Throughout this part, I explore the four areas of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), including many of the relevant national academic standards. I also discuss ways to integrate STEM subjects with each other and combine them with other subjects, such as English, social studies, and the arts.

Part 3

: Employing Approaches to STEM Education.

In this part, I dive into the key elements of creating a STEM lesson and a STEM curriculum, including how to assess STEM education to figure out student progress. I also cover additional ways to enhance the STEM program for your students.

Part 4

: Troubleshooting STEM Education.

This part focuses on a variety of cases that dive into the particular aspects of teaching STEM, including planning for classroom needs, finding opportunities for STEM instruction at home, and working with diverse student populations.

Part 5

: The Part of Tens.

A classic feature of the

For Dummies

series is the Part of Tens chapters. In this part, you can get some ideas for quick and easy STEM lessons that you can do with little prep and resources that should be available to you free or for a low cost.

Foolish Assumptions

This book is for anyone who teaches STEM subjects to a younger or less experienced person. Though I often reference teachers, students, classrooms, and schools throughout this book, most of the information is also useful for homeschooling, tutoring, and non-traditional STEM teaching environments and situations.

I do make the following assumptions about you, the people who are reading this book:

You know the content that you’re teaching

(though you need not be an expert). I don’t spend much time explaining the actual STEM concepts, except for a bit in

Part 2

at a high level. You can find other resources (including many in the

For Dummies

series) if you need a deeper understanding of a specific subject such as physics, biology, or 3D printing.

You have some background experience with the fundamentals of teaching,

such as classroom management strategies and preparing lesson plans, either through formal training or that you picked up along the way. If you need those fundamentals, then two great resources are

Instructional Design for Dummies

and

First Year Teaching For Dummies

.

Your goal is to teach STEM content broadly,

rather than to focus on teaching a specific skill within STEM. Someone teaching a STEM-related career certification course can benefit from this book, but I didn’t write it specifically for those situations.

Guidance throughout this book is useful for educators at a range of levels, from administrators to individual teachers and even parents wanting to give more STEM opportunities to their kids.

Icons Used in This Book

Throughout this book, icons in the margins highlight certain types of valuable information that they call out for your attention. Here are the icons you encounter and a brief description of each.

The Tip icon marks tips and shortcuts that you can use to make planning lessons and teaching STEM easier.

The Remember icon marks information that’s especially important to know. To siphon off the most important information in each chapter, you can just skim through these icons.

The Technical Stuff icon marks information of a highly technical nature that you can normally skip over. (This one isn’t often used in this book.)

The Warning icon tells you to watch out! It marks important information that may save you headaches, particularly content that can easily cause problems when presented poorly.

Beyond the Book

In addition to the abundance of information and guidance related to teaching STEM that I provide in this book, you get access to even more help and information online at dummies.com. To check out this book’s online Cheat Sheet, just go to www.dummies.com and search for Teaching STEM For Dummies Cheat Sheet.

Where to Go from Here

If you’re looking to get a feel for STEM in general, then start at the beginning (Chapter 1) and work your way through from there. The For Dummies style is modular, so feel free to jump around in the book as needed. References within the text give an idea of where you might find useful information in another chapter.

If you are an experienced teacher looking to focus on understanding STEM content, you may want to dive straight into Part 2. If you are knowledgeable about STEM content but want tips on forming lessons, you might find that Part 3 is a good place to start. Of course, the Table of Contents and the Index are good places for finding specific topic.

Part 1

Getting Started with Teaching STEM

IN THIS PART …

Get a high-level perspective on STEM education and how teaching its core disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) differs from more traditional education approaches.

Explore key educational principles of STEM education and the benefits that can come from that approach.

Review the history of STEM-related education in the United States, including an overview of the modern academic frameworks for STEM areas.

Chapter 1

The Nuts and Bolts of STEM Education

IN THIS CHAPTER

Exploring STEM’s meaning

Teaching skills using STEM

Motivating students to become lifelong learners

Looking at new ways to teach

One of the most important jobs that anyone can have involves effectively educating the next generation. Although students need great teaching in all areas, this book emphasizes the teaching of STEM, the areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. These four areas represent some of the more complex subjects that students encounter in K-12 (kindergarten through 12th grade in the U.S.) education. And teaching STEM has unique challenges, but the rewards that students receive — for example, satisfaction from accomplishing a worthwhile task and solving a real-world problem — from quality STEM instruction are tremendous.

STEM education is more than just a bundle of subjects, though. When done right, this education is also a student-centered approach to learning that emphasizes authentic, real-world problem-solving tasks that deeply engage the students.

In this chapter, I start by diving into the meaning of STEM education and then explore why teaching STEM enables teachers to get at important skills that traditional approaches often overlook. You find out how STEM lessons can help to motivate learning among students. Also, you discover how STEM approaches redefine the traditional classroom experience.

Thinking about the Meaning of STEM

What do you think of when you think of a STEM class? Do you picture a classroom with math equations written neatly on a dry-erase whiteboard? A clean and orderly science lab with beakers and test tubes? Students building a bridge out of craft sticks, straws, pipe cleaners, and cardboard? A cluttered workshop with a half-built robot? High-tech drones flying through an obstacle course?

Depending on their backgrounds, any two people can have starkly different images of what it means to teach STEM. Any time you discuss STEM with others, take some time to make sure that they are aware of their preconceptions. You want to be talking about the same thing.

Core STEM subjects

At the heart of STEM are four core subject areas that make up the acronym. Here are definitions that I use as a jumping-off point.

Science:

Systemic approach to studying the structure and behavior of the natural and physical world, through a mix of observation and experimentation.

Technology:

Study of making modifications to objects or structures in the natural world toward a human-driven goal.

Engineering:

Systemic and iterative approach to designing objects, processes, and systems toward a human-driven goal, emphasizing design under given constraints.

Mathematics:

Study of numbers, shapes, and patterns, as well as the abstract and concrete relationships between these concepts and their quantities.

Though schools have included mathematics and science for as long as anyone can remember, only in more recent years have schools demonstrated an explicit drive to loop in engineering and technology, even starting in early elementary school grades.

Within the STEM paradigm, these four subject areas are not independent silos, isolated from each other and united only by a clever acronym. The point of using the acronym STEM is to highlight the underlying connections between these four areas. Some of the connections are obvious — such as the key role mathematics plays in both engineering and science — but some connections are far more subtle (for example, structural similarities between scientific experimentation and engineering design processes).

ACRONYM ORIGINS

The acronym STEM came from those rascals at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), but when they began referring to the concept in the 1990s, they actually used the acronym SMET. In a way, this acronym made more sense because science and mathematics were more well-established as educational subjects, and the goal was to point out the need for greater emphasis on engineering and technology.

Around 2001, American biologist Judith A. Ramaley, assistant director of education and human resources of the NSF, decided to reorder the words to form the acronym STEM. This acronym caught on more broadly and took hold in the ensuing movement to expand teaching in these areas.

Is it a coincidence that a biologist changed the acronym to match the part of a plant? Probably. Regardless, everyone should be very grateful, because talking about STEM just feels better than talking about SMET.

I unpack each of these areas a bit more in Chapter 2 and dive into the related academic standards in Chapter 3. A far more intensive look within each category, and how they integrate together, comes in Part 2.

What different people mean when they say STEM

The four core areas of STEM cover a wide range of human activity, so when people apply the term STEM, they might be using it in different ways. Some people have an expansive definition of STEM (encompassing everything that includes any hint of these subjects), while others have a more restricted one (referring to only hands-on projects in a standalone STEM class that is designed to touch on all of these domains). In general, throughout this book, I take a pretty expansive definition of STEM. In other words, a mathematics class is a STEM class and benefits from incorporating recognized STEM educational practices into it — including finding ways to incorporate other STEM elements.

To be a little more specific, some people use related terms that may help to clarify or expand on the traditional (and potentially vague) acronym of STEM and related educational areas.

These related terms include the following.

STEM subject:

A subject or class such as science, mathematics, algebra, biology, or computer science, which falls squarely within one of the four categories.

Integrated STEM:

At least two STEM areas combined together, possibly in combination with another area such as art, literature, or social studies.

STEAM:

Acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics, with an emphasis on highlighting the role of creativity.

STEAMM:

Acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Mathematics, and Music, which is like STEAM but also highlights the musical arts.

STEMM:

Acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine, focusing on the medical sciences and service fields as a separate discipline.

Career and Technical Education (CTE):

Related to teaching skilled trades and career preparation, particularly those areas with specific technical requirements. At one time, schools referred to these areas as

vocational arts

or

shop class

.

The Maker Movement:

Cultural and educational movement that emphasizes construction, design, and invention, with a large overlap with the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) culture.

People can feel passionate about their particular acronym or phrasing, and since the goal with all of this is to make sure that students are engaged and learning, I generally find that getting into an argument over exactly what wording you’re using isn’t worthwhile. See the sidebar, “STEM, STEAM, and Creativity,” for more thoughts about the use of various acronyms.

I mainly use the STEM acronym throughout this book. And I don’t intend to exclude the importance of artistic and other aspects to the problem-solving and critical-thinking processes.

Helping Students Acquire Necessary Skills

One way to think about education involves wanting kids, by the time they get out of high school (or college, if that’s their path), to be the kind of people that you’d be happy to have as a neighbor or coworker…or both! Heck, you might even have them as an in-law!

Toward this goal, society evolved an educational system in which students participate in a little over a decade of education. During this time, teachers (and parents) strive to impart the civic and intellectual skills that will achieve this end — that of producing people who are well-adapted to both the job market and civic life.

But which skills do educators actually focus on? And how does STEM help impart those skills?

Academic skills

Most people naturally think of classes as focusing on teaching academic skills. Classes in school are named for the academic subjects, after all. STEM education is firmly rooted in teaching the academic disciplines, and teaching them with a high level of rigor, so nothing about teaching STEM means moving away from that. However, it may mean thinking about those academic disciplines and assessing those academic skills in less-traditional ways.

Sometimes, very bright kids just don’t fit the mold of traditional students. Some very smart kids who can explain things well in discussions freeze up when taking tests. Or kids may test well but have grades that reflect an inability to turn in homework rather than a lack of knowledge.

Here’s how the STEM approach steps in to help out all students.

It focuses on learning and doing: One of the major goals of a STEM approach to education is to embed crucial academic skills in authentic, real-world problem-solving tasks. The learning and the doing of the task are mixed together, so it’s very hard for any student to just coast on through without participating.

It advances skills to a higher level:

The academic skills themselves move beyond just the memorization of facts.

How

you know or do things is just as important as

what

you know or do. More details on this concept in

Chapter 2

.

It benefits kids across the ability spectrum:

Students who traditionally do well academically are successful in applying their knowledge in the real world. Students who haven’t traditionally thrived academically have a new path, with practical activities giving context for previously esoteric knowledge.

Collaboration and employability skills

One other major element of STEM instruction is that it often moves away from a traditional individual approach (in which each student is working on their own task) to a structure that was once the bane of all overachievers — the group project.

Most people that I know have a negative view of group projects, and that’s largely because the people they work with on the projects (the group) have let them down so many times. Historically, teaching collaboration and teamwork skills haven’t been a strong component of classroom instruction.

Early education focuses on basic social skills such as getting along, but actually working productively in a group involves more than just not shoving your partner. These group collaboration skills rarely have been a point of explicit emphasis in traditional classroom instruction once you pass into upper elementary school.

This lack of focus on collaborative skills makes sense in an environment in which science education looks primarily at acquiring knowledge and memorizing facts. When you need to know if each kid has memorized the facts, mixing a bunch of them to work together muddies the water, because you don’t know for sure who contributed what. But when the process is just as important as the facts (like in the STEM approach), space opens up for different groups to explore different approaches and find those that work.

STEM, STEAM, AND CREATIVITY

The STEAM acronym has become increasingly popular in recent years. Solving a problem or designing something is inherently a creative act. When given an open-ended problem, groups of people approach it from wildly divergent paths.

As a result, I don’t think the “Art” needs to be added in to STEM for you to know that designing and artistic creativity are part of the process. Creativity should be a natural part of the engineering design process (see Chapter 6). So, calling the educational approach STEAM is mostly about messaging.

Could a problem arise when using the STEAM acronym? My only reservation to this term stems from seeing a “STEAM project” that is little more than an art project about a vaguely science-adjacent concept. You could do a dozen such projects and feel like you’ve accomplished a lot of STEAM, even if you have perhaps touched only slightly on the deep learning of STEM concepts.

For more about integrating the arts and STEM together, see Chapter 8.

You can find out more about these skills in Chapter 2, and then about how to teach (and assess) them throughout Part 3.

Embracing the Challenge (and Promise) of STEM Education

In addition to teaching skills, STEM education meets students where they are and reinforces certain core educational values that will benefit them throughout their lifetimes. I cover these and more benefits of STEM education in greater depth in Chapter 2.

Establish a culture of learning

One sign of a successful, STEM-centered classroom is that students are continually looking for questions to ask, ideas to explore, and things to learn about. You don’t want them to passively receive information but instead recognize knowledge as something that they can actively seek out.

Throughout the book, I return to this idea of creating a culture of learning (particularly in Chapters 9 and 13), but here are three key elements you can think about incorporating into your teaching approach immediately:

Encourage intellectual risk-taking.

You might reward students who go out of their way to present an idea that seems out-of-the-box in some way. Instead of quickly dismissing such thinking to get on with the required lesson, validate such unorthodox ideas. You can maybe even spend some time discussing their implications and how you might be able to test or explore them (before returning to the lesson).

Always create a central focus on student questions.

For example, maintain a physical space, such as a guiding questions board, where students can pose questions. Some questions will be resolved quickly, but others might linger and provide motivation for future lessons.

Empower students to look for multiple answers.

Give them an opportunity to brainstorm and come up with as many possible answers before moving on to the stage of resolving whether any specific answer works.

Often, teachers find themselves unintentionally thwarting these key elements through applying too much emphasis on getting the facts into the students’ brains as quickly and efficiently as possible. And it’s understandable, largely due to structural elements of the school day. Teachers have a lot of material to get through, often moving along at a set pace to meet defined learning objectives throughout the year. The neuroscience of learning (see Chapter 9) tells us that taking more time on the initial learning actually helps solidify the information more firmly in the learner’s mind.

Encouraging questions is worth the risk

Though I love the saying, “There’s no such thing as a stupid question,” the reason it gets used so often is that people — both kids and adults — are constantly terrified that they’re asking stupid questions. It can be incredibly difficult to ask a question in front of a group of people, especially when you sort of suspect that most of them actually know the answer and that you’re revealing your ignorance.

One goal of a classroom should absolutely be that students feel intellectually safe. It is crucial that students not only feel comfortable displaying their knowledge, but also (and perhaps more importantly) demonstrating, acknowledging, and explaining their ignorance.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that a student should get by with being rude in the guise of asking questions. You don’t have to tolerate an inherently offensive question like “Why is Andrew such an idiot?” just because you’re trying to establish a question-asking culture.

Helping kids become question machines

I once heard a famous cosmologist (and also a parent) make the joke that, at some point, the answer to the question of “Why?” is “Go to bed.” Kids, by nature, ask questions as a means of engaging with the unknown parts of the world — that is, until they are taught that asking those questions isn’t acceptable.

As a teacher, you have no control over the messages kids are getting from their families, their friends, or the media they consume … but you can control how you’re presenting things in your classroom.

Make sure that questions aren’t just allowed but encouraged. Almost any lesson that you’re doing can contain a couple of minutes in which you solicit a list of questions related to the subject. I cover some specifics on how to approach encouraging questions in Chapter 9.

Students who discover that asking questions is valuable don’t just stop asking questions when the bell rings. After you establish that culture of learning, it increases student engagement in all areas. Students will also be inclined to ask questions about world and historical events, or about literature they’re reading.

Turning students into answer seekers

It might seem like all of these new student-generated questions can only compound the frustration. How are you going to get through all the material you need to cover? But wait! Though they are comfortable asking you those questions, they aren’t actually dependent upon you to give them the answers. In fact, answering all the questions is no longer your job! Your job has now become giving them the tools, resources, and space to figure out the answers on their own.

Being the source of answers to all student questions short-circuits the goal. You don’t want to teach them that they can easily get answers to questions from an authority figure. You want to teach them how to figure out strategies to find the answers. Asking the question sets the student’s mind on high alert to look for a path to the answers. If the student is mentally alert when engaging with the subject to ask questions, then that means they’re also going to be looking for the answers to those questions.

Motivate students with engaging lessons

When you put the students’ hands to work, you get their brains for free! And STEM lessons are great at giving students something to do with their hands, and then dragging the brain along for the ride.

Developing STEM lessons, particularly on the first try, might take some extra preparation compared to other types of lessons. For one thing, you often have to gather materials, or plan for the availability of necessary technology. But after you get the project (lesson) going, the students should really begin diving into it and taking ownership. This student engagement gives you the freedom to focus on the students who need help while other groups are able to progress on their own.

Throwing Out the Old Rulebook

You likely have a memory of a fairly traditional classroom experience, and one of my goals throughout this book is to challenge the assumption that the way you learned was the best way to learn. Or, at the very least, to challenge the idea that it was the only way to learn.

Despite all the changes that have taken place in classrooms over the years, if you walk into a traditional classroom in most of America today, you won’t recognize a huge number of fundamental differences from fifty years ago. Yes, there are a few. Kids have computers and fewer books. Teachers are more likely to arrange desks in groups than orderly rows. Dry-erase whiteboards have replaced chalkboards, and overhead projectors are now digital.

But it’s often still a teacher at the front of the class lecturing students. The big change in delivery comes from the occasional video.

Some of the changes noted are improvements, to be sure, but they also don’t inherently transform education. A student half-listening to a lecture isn’t significantly worse than a student half-listening to a video.

As you read through this book, I challenge you to think about what a classroom learning environment would be like if the students were actively engaged in the lessons. Is there a way to modify the approach to education that centers on the student, by elevating them as the owner of their learning?

My hope is that, by reading this book, you see that STEM provides a foundation for throwing out the old rulebook and building exactly the sort of engaging classroom that we need to educate future generations of lifelong learners.

Chapter 2

What STEM Is (and Why It Matters)

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding the elements of STEM

Embracing STEM education principles

Exploring benefits gained from STEM

Shortly after I became a district STEM coordinator, one of the teachers said to me, “I really love STEM, but I hate math.” To her, STEM clearly meant something that didn’t include mathematics (or, at the least, didn’t include a traditional math class). Similarly, I’ve heard people ask questions like, “Is this lesson science or STEM?” So, some people draw distinctions that I wouldn’t, because (as I say in Chapter 1) I use the term STEM expansively, and to me, every single science lesson and math lesson could be a STEM lesson, even in a standalone science or math class.

In this chapter, you find a broad overview of the meaning of STEM from a variety of perspectives. You find out about the core principles of STEM education that differentiate it from more traditional academic approaches. And you discover the most significant benefits that students can gain from engaging directly with STEM education.

Describing Core STEM Concepts

If you spend any time talking with people about STEM education, you may realize that different people use this acronym in different ways. Suppose you talk to three people; each could be thinking about just one of the following aspects of STEM:

A collection of separate, individual math and science classes

A standalone integrated STEM class

A certification program for a STEM-related profession

From my perspective (and I’m the one writing the book), none of these three hypothetical people are wrong in their use of STEM to name the aspect that they’re describing. But they could become confused if they’re engaged in conversation with each other because they’re thinking of slightly different interpretations (of the term STEM) and will certainly face different challenges when dealing with the various aspects of STEM.

The easiest thing to recognize about STEM is that it’s an acronym standing for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Some of these component subjects have always been included in a school curriculum, and others may seem a bit more exotic — and intimidating to teach.

As intimidating as each area is to teach on its own, you also encounter the complication that the boundaries between the component subjects of STEM can be fuzzy. Doesn’t engineering depend in part on understanding scientific principles? Doesn’t mathematics play a key role in computer programming and scientific experiments? Isn’t technology used heavily in science? If you’re asking these questions, you’re right to do so!

No clear dividing lines exist between these four subject areas. They constantly touch upon and influence each other. One of the major goals of this book — and the STEM movement in general — is to try to increasingly think of how to teach these concepts together as one single unified whole, without introducing artificial barriers between them.

In the following sections, I explore each component STEM subject in turn and set a foundation for the deeper dive into each of them that you can find in Part 2 of this book.

Science: How the world works

At its core, science is the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the natural and physical world, through a careful mix of observation and experimentation. The initial placement of science in the STEM acronym helps to highlight its importance in education (although, realistically, an acronym like TEMS probably wouldn’t have caught on well).

Teaching is always a balancing act between teaching the facts about a subject (referred to as content knowledge) and teaching the thinking or methodology of that subject (which is called conceptual knowledge). Perhaps in no other subject (except maybe mathematics) is the difference between these two types of knowledge more apparent than in science.

The conceptual knowledge of science,

thinking and methodology, involves asking careful questions around the functions of the natural world. When thinking scientifically, you formulate a hypothesis about how some aspect of the world works, then use a mix of experimentation and observation to gather evidence to support or refute your hypothesis.

The content knowledge of science,

facts, involves discovering the answers to the questions used to create hypotheses for experimentation and observation.

Of course, traditional science education has always included the goal of building up habits of thought, reasoning, and ability to engage in an inquiry within a scientific context (the conceptual knowledge). But through much of its history, the main way that science education did so was by transforming the methodology of science into something that could easily be taught and evaluated as a form of content knowledge.

A classic approach to science education uses a scientific demonstration, or lab, where a student receives an ordered list of steps to perform to conduct an experiment. The student knows that following the steps correctly will produce the desired outcome. This approach is great for the teacher, who can then ask questions on a worksheet or test about those steps, and easily identify whether the student remembers and understands the process they carried out. This would seem to provide a clear way to teach (and assess) students regarding the methodology of this scientific idea.

The problem with this traditional approach is that you haven’t actually taught the students how to ask the questions or come up with a way of resolving the questions (formulate a hypothesis). Instead, you walk them through an example of how someone else has done so. Certainly, examples can be incredibly helpful in showing students how the conceptual process works. But if working through these guided experiments is the culmination of students’ scientific engagement in the classroom, then the classroom never gives them practice at struggling authentically with the actual questions.

A major goal of modern science education is letting the students struggle with the actual questions and figure out how to solve them. The teacher is there to provide support — including direct instruction, review, and scaffolding (gradually reducing direct support as a student gains ability and confidence) as needed. But in an authentic STEM approach, teachers aren’t there to hand out the solutions.

Technology: Tools of the trade

Although teachers and students have always used technology in the classroom, that technology has usually been in service to other educational goals. Students over the last century learned to use slide rules and calculators to help them with math, or learned to use pencils, typewriters, or word processors so that they could write essays. And all of those technologies, at this point, have largely been supplanted by personal computers or the tiny supercomputers (smartphones) that most people carry around in their pockets!

If you pay close attention to the evolution of technologies used in education, you will realize that the definition of technology must be immensely broad. And indeed it is! The National Assessment Governing Board, in their 2014 document Technology and Engineering Literacy Framework (found at https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED563941.pdf), defines technology this way:

Technology is any modification of the natural world done to fulfill human needs or desires.

This view of technology includes everything from the invention of paper to the creation of the internet, or from the wheeled cart to the electronic, self-flying drones that deliver packages to your home (if you’re lucky enough to live in the right places).

If this description of technology feels somewhat like engineering to you, you’re not wrong. The T in STEM focuses on the actual use of technology, the “modification of the natural world.” The process of designing the modification is the E in STEM, or engineering. These component subject areas of STEM aren’t disconnected silos of knowledge; the concepts touch and overlap with each other all over the place. In this case, every technology was, at some point, engineered!

Because a student has no idea which forms of technology may someday become relevant to their life, having a solid foundation in understanding and using technology is incredibly important. They don’t have to become a computer programmer, an engineer, or an astronaut to have a job in which they’ll engage regularly with technology.

Engineering: Make it so

Possibly the area of STEM that is least traditional in the classroom is the emphasis on engineering. When I was in middle school, a handful of quarterly classes focused on metalworking and woodworking (generally called “shop class” at the time). These classes covered some elements of design and engineering, but outside of them, engineering concepts were rarely taught.

STEM looks to put the process of design at the extreme front and center in the curriculum. The National Assessment Governing board’s 2014 report (found at https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED563941.pdf) defines engineering in this way:

Engineering is a systematic and often iterative approach to designing objects, processes, and systems to meet human needs and wants.

Combining the definitions of technology (see the previous section) and engineering is the way someone goes about making changes to create the technology that produces the outcome they want. Engineering is inherently process-driven and gives students an amazing opportunity to engage in hands-on work that is often minimized in favor of more academic (or theoretical) approaches to learning.

I return to this significant aspect of emphasizing engineering in STEM throughout this book: the idea that STEM work is iterative work. Engineering, more than any other element in STEM, does not expect something to work (be completely understood or successful) the first time. Engineering instruction often explicitly emphasizes the iterative engineering design process (or something similar), as covered in Chapter 6.

In science, technology, or mathematics, if you really understand the concepts at work, you should (at least in theory) be able to conduct an experiment, get a piece of technology to work, or solve a problem on the first attempt. But, despite what you see in comic books (or comic book movies), even the most brilliant engineer won’t likely build a fully functional, complex prototype on their first attempt.

Mathematics: By the numbers

Of the subjects related to STEM, the one that paradoxically gets both the most and least interest is mathematics. It gets the most interest because states test mathematics frequently and those tests come with high stakes. Schools and all other stakeholders care about how kids do on mathematics tests. They care that their kids can do the math.

But mathematics is often not the favorite part of a STEM lesson, by either students or teachers (as the STEM teacher at the start of the chapter indicates). If you walk into a room where robots are hurling ping-pong balls at flying drones, you don’t immediately think, “There’s a lot of math happening in this classroom.” (I’ve never actually walked into a STEM classroom with that sort of activity, although now that I’ve written the previous sentence, it’s on my bucket list.)

As someone who started out in math education, I can tell you that no one says, “Oh, that’s exciting!” when you introduce yourself as a math teacher. The reaction is frequently, “I hate math.” But you generally get a pretty positive reaction when you tell someone that you teach STEM — assuming they know what the acronym stands for. (I’ve often wondered whether language arts teachers have educated adults candidly tell them, “I hate books,” during small talk at dinner parties.)

But the mathematics associated with STEM projects is crucial, for a variety of reasons. Mathematics

Enables you to be precise in constraints in a way that gets you closer to the results you need on your initial experimental attempts.

The old adage in construction — measure twice, cut once — holds here. If you’re guessing that something looks close enough, you’re likely going to need multiple attempts to make exactly what you’re aiming for.

Gives you a way of thinking that focuses on breaking down problems

into discrete, well-defined steps.

Sadly, mathematics education doesn’t always do a great job of teaching mathematical thinking. In the earlier section, “Science: How the world works,” I compare content knowledge and conceptual knowledge, both of which also apply to mathematics. Knowing that the interior angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees is content knowledge. Knowing what to do with that fact to solve a problem is a type of conceptual knowledge.

Throughout this book, I push teachers to incorporate mathematics explicitly and thoroughly throughout their STEM instruction. As someone who’s taught advanced mathematics to some of the most disadvantaged students in the country, I have developed high expectations about what young people can accomplish mathematically with the right instruction. STEM lays the groundwork for that sort of instruction.

Adopting the Major Principles of STEM Education

A variety of principles in education often seem to find a fairly natural home in STEM education. Built on recent research in neuroscience and the psychology of learning, STEM approaches leverage some basic elements of the best traditional teaching practices in a way that can be hard to match in other content areas.

Inquiry and project-based learning

A central aspect of a STEM-based approach to learning emphasizes the importance of authentic work that ties into the real world. This focus largely comes about through lessons that teachers structure in two ways:

Inquiry-based learning,

in which students work to formulate and answer specific questions; and

Project-based learning,

in which students work to accomplish a productive task.

STEM lends itself particularly well to both of these educational approaches because they are foundational for how progress happens in STEM fields. And because these approaches are fundamental, people often equate STEM primarily with them and may not consider a traditional science or math lesson to really be STEM. (I mention this question from a teacher — “Is this lesson science or STEM?” — in the chapter introduction.)

In order for STEM teaching approaches to work, the problems around which students are asking and answering questions or completing projects must be relevant to them. The problems must resonate with their interests and their lives.

A teacher’s personal enthusiasm for gardening, rock collecting, or aviation history may carry through to the students and provide a rich foundation for a variety of STEM projects — or it might not. Experienced teachers often have stories about a lesson plan that worked great for one school year but fell flat with the next group of students. The second group just had no interest in the lesson material, even though the teacher didn’t change anything when presenting it.

Structuring lessons by using inquiry-based learning and project-based learning isn’t a magic bullet that automatically converts otherwise unsuccessful learning experiences into successes. As with many situations in life, implementation (the execution of the structured lesson) matters. I focus on implementation in Chapter 9, but later in this chapter, I cover benefits of (in the section, “Reaping the Benefits of STEM”) and concerns with these learning approaches.

Mistakes as cornerstones of learning

Many view the goal of a lesson as having the students understand things quickly and do a task without making mistakes. Not only is this perspective frustrating — because it’s often unrealistic — but it’s also not desirable. Authentic learning generally comes from failing at something and then correcting your thoughts or behavior to try again and remedy that failure.

Mistakes are fundamental to the learning process, not an impediment to it. Everyone makes mistakes, but the key to learning is figuring out how to avoid making the same mistakes in the future. An intelligent person should move on to making entirely different mistakes!

Integrating concepts across content

Not to sound like a broken record, but subjects in education are often siloed in artificial ways because that’s how the schools schedule class time and hand out grades. But in reality, there’s always a huge overlap between content areas.

This structural issue isn’t isolated to STEM, of course. If you’re studying history by referencing historical essays or primary sources, you’re also practicing and demonstrating your reading comprehension ability.

The fuzzy borders between the different STEM subjects help highlight that traditional silos are artificial, and that knowledge and skills have a flexible quality to them that can cross boundaries. Although you will certainly find differences between analyzing a chemical compound and debugging a computer program, you will also discover some significant similarities between those mental processes.

Step-by-step reasoning

The STEM fields, perhaps more than any other subjects (except philosophy), help focus the mind on clearly defining and walking through steps of reasoning to arrive at a conclusion. And in STEM, if your reasoning has a flaw, you’re likely to recognize it when you put your hypothesis to the test (as opposed to much of philosophy, where tests often don’t exist).

Learning to reason (think logically) has benefits well outside of STEM, of course. For example, I don’t know whether you know this, but I’m currently writing a book. (Hint: You’re currently reading it.) To the degree that I am able to frame and communicate a clearly written line of reasoning (and you can be the judge of that), I attribute much of that ability to my training in the sciences.

Centering the student

Centering the student in STEM education involves making the student’s active participation, enthusiasm, and sense of ownership in the learning process the driving priority. Teachers accomplish this connection with the students in various ways, including

Encouraging creativity and self-expression: The goal of many well-constructed STEM lessons involves having the teacher define the parameters of a problem without specifically defining every element of the strategy that the students must use to solve it.

The emphasis, particularly in younger grades, is on clearly demonstrating that lessons have room for the students’ creativity and self-expression in both science and engineering. (Perhaps less self-expression in math, although looking at the work of M.C. Escher or Jessica Hagy can show an awful lot of room for self-expression and creativity.) Check out Figure 2-1 for a look at Hagy’s deceptively simply way to draw connections between diverse topics.

Offering opportunities for successful participation: Of course, some other lessons may be narrowly defined. These types of lessons are essentially demonstrations in which the students perform the demonstration for themselves by following a pre-set recipe.

Chemistry and physics students traditionally complete lab assignments where they follow well-defined instructions. For these assignments, if the students make mistakes, the result can show an unexpected outcome. Even in this case, though, students derive a benefit from walking through the process, rather than merely watching the teacher provide a demonstration in front of the class.

Courtesy of Jessica Hagy

FIGURE 2-1: Connecting ideas simply but impactfully.

Equity and access in STEM

When I talk about centering the student in STEM (see the preceding section), keep in mind that I mean centering every