Deer Park Elementary in Pasco County, Florida has established a makerspace through internal funding and donations from local businesses. Teacher Bettie Donovan leads students in exploring coding, designing, 3-D printing and the building and testing of electrical circuits. This short video celebrates the excitement and engagement of Deer Park students working across the STEM subjects in their makerspace.
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STEM Builds Capacity for Our Future [INFOGRAPHIC]
According to the Smithsonian Science Education Center, who created the infographic above, jobs in science and technology are expected to increase up to 23% by 2020. Technology occupations are projected for the most growth among all STEM jobs, and STEM-based occupations out-earn non-STEM occupations between 12 and 30%. Overall, those who understand science, technology, engineering and math are more competitive, more productive, and more engaged as citizens of the global community.
Creating an Engine for Breakthrough Innovation in STEM Education
Reposted from the U.S. Department of Education Office of Innovation and Improvement:
Just as we created DARPA to keep the United States at the forefront of technological advancement, we must pursue advanced education research projects to create breakthrough innovations to ensure that future generations of Americans have the skills and abilities they need to compete in and lead the world. Advancements emerging from this process would create the next generation of innovative, highly trained scientists and engineers to sustain a significant technological lead. It would also help to create an education system that promotes lifelong learning to enable U.S. workers to continue to adapt to rapidly changing technology environments and remain competitive.
Projects created within a DARPA model — like those necessary to win the race to the moon — do not fit well within traditional research management structures in which basic and applied research are separated. Typical applied research programs require specific milestones and clearly defined deliverables. Project details remain fairly static over the course of a project or program. In the DARPA model, by contrast, every project is a mini-moonshot. The final goal is clear, but the process for getting there remains nimble to account for what is learned during the research process and what new challenges may arise.
How do we use this process to create innovation in education? We bring together interdisciplinary teams of world-class experts with proven track records of innovative thought and action. It requires a balance of expertise, flexibility, discipline, collaboration, and creativity along with a visionary program officer to lead the work of these experts according to a rigorous program plan. Performers are given plenty of room to be creative while progressing toward the established goal.
The Fallacy Of Top-Down Education Reform
Reposted from Forbes:
Back in 1995 in my state of Oregon the legislature came up with a new educational program that was going to improve test scores and graduate more students. It was called the Educational Act for the 21st century and was widely applauded by the Federal Government, state bureaucrats, educators and parents. The plan spawned a bewildering number of committees, councils, and school debates and devised Certificates of Initial Mastery (CIM) and Certifications of Advanced Mastery (CAM), with all of the necessary curriculum changes, new standards, and tests. It was a classic committee “top down” approach to solve our education problems.
Four years later Oregon’s test scores showed no improvement. 17 years later The Oregonian reported that “Oregon high schools have made zero progress in getting more students to graduate with the skills they need to pass college classes. Today The Oregonian said “act test scores show that half the state’s high school graduates aren’t fully prepared, and are exhibiting poor skills on core subjects. Similar “top down” programs have been tried in all of the states with different names but the same poor results. This includes the Federal program “No Child Left Behind”
All of these efforts were sincere efforts to improve education but they all seemed to assume that if you could invent some kind of magical curriculum for high schools that with discipline, accountability, and perhaps brute force you could pull the children up through some kind of magic filter to higher skills, and have more kids graduate from high schools with fewer dropouts. But it is clear that there is something really wrong with the “top down” magical curriculum approaches.
Reimagining Learning Space: Let Spontaneous Collisions Happen!
Reposted from MindShift:
“There’s no teacher at the front,” says Gensler’s Shawn Gehle. “The rooms are like different scenes in a video game. They inspire active learning.
As K–12 schools refocus on team-based, interdisciplinary learning, they are moving away from standardized, teach-to-test programs that assume a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching. Instead, there is a growing awareness that students learn in a variety of ways, and the differences should be supported. The students often learn better by doing it themselves, so teachers are there to facilitate, not just to instruct. Technology is there as a tool and resource, not as a visual aid or talking head.
When it comes to integrating STEM into classroom space, there are real implications for how teachers interact, says Thaler. “When you put math and science teachers together, they can cross-collaborate on lesson plans. If they’re teaching trigonometry or wave properties in math, they know they have to pull in the physics faculty also.” Schools that embrace STEM end up retraining. “They have to stretch their conception of what’s being taught.” They were inspired by facilities that “let spontaneous collisions happen,” Thaler notes, but the takeaway was less a model than a point of view. Gensler documented it in a paper on STEM education. One of its major findings was that, to succeed, STEM and other interdisciplinary programs need to create propinquity—literally, “nearness” – among their participants.
Actualization 