STEM Pedagogies

I teach at a lower-income high school where most students struggle with motivation and work ethic in their educational settings.  A lot of students lack structure at home and, as a result, are more or less left on their own to navigate through their secondary education.  That leaves a pretty heavy job for teachers with classes full of students who don’t want to be there.  Solely for mere effectiveness at our school, the teacher must put an enormous amount of work into creating a learning environment full of engaging, interesting activities to spark some sort of interest.  Because of this, I have the pleasure of working alongside so many innovating, outside-the-box teachers that are always crafting up new activities and ways to help student not just learn, but be excited about learning.   From adaptations of board games to relay races to scavenger hunts to cell phone games, I have both observed and implemented all kinds of teaching strategies at my school.  It is a very beneficial learning environment for teachers as well!  I feel like I am always picking up new tricks and ideas, and becoming a better teacher every day.  A big connection to what we do in our school and our course work so far is project-based learning.  As I mentioned, a lot of our students struggle with motivation and desire to do well.  They are constantly writing off the importance of schoolwork with the notion that it doesn’t apply to them or does not help them in the real world.  Project-based learning, specifically authentic projects, help them to see the connections and adds a little motivation and interest in the work.  We are also focused on expanding literacy through all content areas.  We have increased our focus on STEM literacy ad eliminating the notion that “literacy is not for math/science, it’s only in English.”  We have done a lot of work incorporating literacy skills specific to STEM (ex. Reading a graph, using symbols, etc.) as well as reading and writing surrounding technical or informational literature. 

A gap I see in my school would pertain to ELL’s in general education classes.  I do teach a specific ESOL Algebra 1 class where I have a co-teacher and we have the time and ability to modify the work and create more scaffolding to help them succeed.  The gap that I see is when there is an ELL student in regular classes.  It is so easy for them to sink back into a corner and get lost.  Because STEM is so vocabulary heavy, ELL’s who are already struggling with basic vocabulary can easily be overwhelmed.   To prevent this, I have seen that small group work can be beneficial for them, where they can get more individual attention in a lower risk setting.  I also see that gifted and talented students can easily be overlooked.  With so many other issues pertaining to behavior and motivation, it can be hard to account for students who work quicker or who have more skills initially.  I find that adding supplementary aspects to their work can modify the standard assignment into something more challenging.  It could be something as simple as writing two paragraphs instead of one when responding to a written assignment, or doing more complex problems instead of the easier ones.   I most frequently will utilize my few gifted students to help me teach! If a student finishes work extremely quickly, I will grab them and have them circulate the room helping me to answer questions.  This allows them to gain experience in leadership roles and helps build collaborative and communication skills. Being able to incorporate these kinds of modifications and adaptations for the different sub-populations is what can really take a good class to be a great class.  With a school like mine that struggles with severely below-grade level students and literacy issues, the biggest thing to improve for us will be that cross-content literacy and emphasizing the importance of literacy in all content areas.