Lg Steam Program

[Edco Haglund]

Using STEAM education results in students who take thoughtful risks, engage in experiential learning, persist in problem-solving, embrace collaboration, and work through the creative process. These are the innovators, educators, leaders, and learners of the 21st century! This comprehensive article will help you understand the keys to a meaningful STEAM effort.

Our world is a beautiful, complex, and intricate tapestry of learning all in its own right. Why do we believe that we have the ability or the right to box it in behind brick walls and classroom doors in a place called school?

It takes what we do when we open the doors to the real world and places those same practices in our cycles of teaching and learning. So we can finally remove the brick walls and classroom doors to get at the heart of learning.

Recent research shows that STEAM is a promising approach to positively impacting student achievement and teacher efficacy. In a 2016 study, researchers investigated the impact of STEAM lessons on physical science learning in grades 3 to 5 in high poverty elementary schools in an urban district. Findings indicated that students who received just nine hours of STEAM instruction made improvements in their science achievement (Brouillette, L., & Graham, N. J.).

Another study from 2014 shows the connecting STEAM and literacy can positively impact cognitive development, increase literacy and math skills, and help students reflect meaningfully on their work and that of their peers (Cunnington, Marisol, Andrea Kantrowitz, Susanne Harnett, and Aline Hill-Ries.).

The STEM to STEAM movement has been taking root over the past several years and is surging forward as a positive mode of action to truly meet the needs of a 21st century economy. STEM alone misses several key components that many employers, educators, and parents have voiced as critical for our children to thrive in the present and rapidly approaching future.

STEAM is a way to take the benefits of STEM and complete the package by integrating these principles in and through the arts. STEAM takes STEM to the next level: it allows students to connect their learning in these critical areas together with arts practices, elements, design principles, and standards to provide the whole pallet of learning at their disposal. STEAM removes limitations and replaces them with wonder, critique, inquiry, and innovation.

The pathway to STEAM is exciting, but can also be dangerous without an understanding of what STEAM truly means in both its intention and its implementation. Like its STEM predecessor, STEAM can stop short of its best manifestation without several core components:

This is where the fun happens! After students have dived deep into a problem or question and have analyzed current solutions as well as what still needs addressed, they can begin to create their own solution or composition to the problem. This is where they use the skills, processes and knowledge that were taught in the discovery stage and put them to work.

This step is what closes the loop. Students have a chance to reflect on the feedback that was shared and on their own process and skills. Based on that reflection, students are able to revise their work as needed and to produce an even better solution.

Inquiry, curiosity, being able to find solutions to a problem, and being creative in the finding of the solutions is at the heart of this approach. This means that the humanities are woven into STEAM just like everything else.

You can be literate in math, art, reading, social studies, music and science. Literacy is an action with common components that are embedded into how we consume and share information. As such, it is naturally a part of STEAM.

With those understandings in mind, there are many ways to integrate literacy and STEAM intentionally in your classroom. Here are some examples that you may find helpful in your planning for this year.

Utilizing visual thinking is drawing upon the foundation of literacy itself. You can read a piece of art or music, the same way you can read a piece of traditional text. Visual thinking strategies are a terrific way to introduce this concept to your students and to practice literacy across all content areas.

By providing your students with a rubric and the freedom to produce their own end product, they will surprise you with how creative they can be! This approach prepares our students for life in the real-world office place where projects are more open-ended with professional freedom. My students competing in the social media challenge were highly motivated. They were engaged in the project because they had buy-in to their creative solution.

I have found that one of the most difficult aspects of supervising a STEAM lesson is providing additional wait time, allowing my students to productively struggle, and ignoring my instinct to suggest a given strategy. For instance, remind your students of the tools that they have around the classroom. Encourage them to communicate their ideas or questions to a partner. However, try to avoid jumping in with guided assistance or additional prompting the moment your students begin to struggle. Having a discussion with your class afterwards about the challenges they faced and what they liked about this type of lesson can help them process it as they may be new to this STEAM approach.

During the initial planning stage of a project, many students need to organize their thoughts, arrange their reading notes, and visualize the bigger picture. This is especially true for students who have a difficult time with inferential reasoning. Thinking maps and graphic organizers can help bridge this divide. A flow map (similar to the step by step boxes of a cartoon) can help students recognize or plan out the steps to an experiment or research project. Another time-saving tip is to ask your technology or media teacher (if your school is lucky enough to have one) to align their lessons with an upcoming project in your classroom. The technology teacher at my school trains the students to choose their own graphic organizers on the Vizzle computer program.

Similar to arts integration, the best quality STEAM lessons intentionally connect 2 aligned standards. The first two components of this list break this down a bit. We want to make sure we purposefully select standards, content areas and topics that make sense together. The easiest way to do this is through seeking similar verbs across standards.

Any good STEAM lesson is grounded in inquiry, problem-solving and process-based learning. In fact, this is one of the distinguishing characteristics between Arts Integration and STEAM. So when viewing STEAM in the classroom, you want to pay close attention to the essential question and the process surrounding its exploration.

What problems are being investigated and solved? How are both contents being used to explore the problems? Why is the process important to the question posed? These are all important components to a STEAM classroom or lesson.

This is an approach, not a scripted curriculum. STEAM is meant to encourage curiosity, ask big questions and provoke creativity in the exploration of problem-solving. Everyone can be a part of that in every class.

As with most approaches in education, we need to ensure that our teachers receive high-quality professional development before implementation. There are plenty of options available, including STEAM conferences and courses. Whichever you choose, just be sure that teachers have the ability to learn more about how this approach works and how to use it in their classrooms.

Since STEAM is an approach, teachers need to understand how to align curricular standards, create integrated assessments, develop lessons that ensure both the arts and the STEM areas are taught with integrity, and specific strategies that can be used with students.

In an effort to evolve schools into 21st century learning hubs, many have chosen to simply rename their STEM teachers as STEAM teachers. This unfortunately does a disservice to both the teachers and the approach.

This is also tied to the release of funding due to the updated ESSA law in 2015. This allowed schools to receive funds if they chose to integrate the arts. Many schools added this to their improvement plans without a true knowledge of what it really takes to weave STEAM in and through a learning pathway. Instead, they asked STEM teachers to become STEAM teachers and add in the arts to their current curriculum.

This approach to learning is certainly not an easy task, but the benefits to students and the entire school community are tremendous. Students and teachers engaged in STEAM make more real-life connections so that school is not a place where you go to learn but instead becomes the entire experience of learning itself. We are always learning, always growing, always experimenting.

STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The need for STEM programming in education developed out of concern that future generations were lacking critical skills needed to succeed in the current and future economy. STEM programming teaches innovation, creativity, critical thinking, problem solving and collaboration among many other skills proven to lead to success.

STEAM stands for science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics. The difference is that arts are included, ranging from visual arts, language arts and physical arts to music and more. STEAM focuses on sparking imagination and creativity through the arts in ways that naturally align with STEM learning.

There is some debate about whether art education should be included in programming promoting science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Some STEM supporters believe that including art takes away from the other core subject matter. Many STEAM supporters believe the arts should not be overlooked and feel that the arts enhance the overall learning experience by adding even more creativity into the mix.

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