STEAM Makers

Fostering Creativity and Innovation in the Elementary Classroom

Jacie Maslyk

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781506336312
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación primaria

Build the essential 4—creativity, collaboration, communication, and critical thinking! Go beyond theory and learn how to systematically integrate STEAM and Maker spaces that prepare students for real-world experiences. This engaging resource outlines step-by-step processes to help anyone start their STEAM and Maker journey. Includes charts, checklists, web links, and profiles to help you make meaningful subject area connections and tap your students’ natural curiosity. You’ll learn to:

• Integrate STEAM and Making into daily practice
• Differentiate instruction for all learners
• Align with core standards and The Next Generation Science Standards

Chapter 1 Learn

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.

—Henry Ford

Imagine a school where students build the classroom furniture, design outdoor landscapes, launch rockets, and create inventions to improve everyday life. What if school learning spaces were designed with comfortable corners for collaboration and areas to foster informal learning? What if students were given the opportunity to learn what they wanted to, pursuing their own interests within the school day? This is happening in elementary classrooms across the country! There is a shift occurring in education that has the potential to transform teaching and learning. With roots that date back to Dewey, Montessori, and Piaget, there is a movement for schools to return creativity and hands-on learning to the classroom, a belief that learning should be active and with students constructing their own knowledge.

While the accountability pressures on schools don’t seem to be going away anytime soon, educators are embracing the idea of a school culture that emphasizes learning by doing. From the early 1900s through present day, student-centered learning has been a part of educational practice. President Barack Obama has taken notice of this renewed concept, stating, “I want us all to think about new and creative ways to engage young people in science and engineering, whether it’s science festivals, robotics competitions, fairs that encourage young people to create and build and invent—to be makers of things, not just consumers of things” (Schulman, 2013). The events the President is suggesting are the types of opportunities that are beginning to occur in innovative schools across the country. The notion of citizens as makers, not consumers, connects to the mindset that is growing the Maker Movement and STEAM education.

There may be some resistance to this approach, especially with ongoing accountability pressures facing schools. With any change in practice comes excitement paired with anxiety and challenge mixed with uncertainty. Despite the push for rigorous content and standardized assessments, many schools are forging ahead with efforts to include STEAM and making into their practices. STEAM Making is experimental and playful at times, but it connects critical academic content as well. As an instructional practice, STEAM Making represents the belief of new possibilities. These possibilities, presented to children, allow them to engage in the process of creating, designing, and pursuing learning that is interesting to them and has value outside of the school walls.

STEAM Making provides the opportunity for kids to get creative, collaborate, and engage in learning that is both challenging and fun. People outside of education are talking about these new ideas and the ways that they can infuse new life into schools and communities. The mayor of Pittsburgh recently opened his Maker Movement Roundtable by saying, “We are at the forefront of something pretty large, not only in this country but around the world.” U.S. News & World Report summed it up best by saying, this initiative is “just getting started”! (http://www.usnews.com/news/stem-solutions/articles/2014/02/13/gaining-steam-teaching-science-though-art).

U.S. News & World Report

A 2008 study titled “Ready to Innovate” revealed that more and more companies are looking for skills in their new employees that involve creativity rather than achievement in core subjects alone. The study reported that companies want workers who can brainstorm, problem solve, collaborate creatively, and communicate new ideas. These aren’t the skills of the 21st century. They are the skills of right now! Similarly, a collaboration of The Conference Board, Corporate Voices for Working Families, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and the Society for Human Resource Management (2006) compiled a report titled Are They Really Ready to Work? and stated, “Among the most important applied skills cited by employers are professionalism and work ethic, oral and written communications, teamwork and collaboration, and critical thinking and problem solving.” We must ask ourselves if our current educational practices are preparing our graduates for this future.

History of STEM

Many point to the Sputnik and the Space Race as the turning point for science education in the United States. Others connect the turning point to poor science and math scores by U.S. students, as highlighted by A Nation at Risk (U.S. National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). Now driven by business demands and the economy, STEM learning has been a prominent buzzword in education.

In the early 2000s, The National Science Foundation (NSF) coined the term STEM: learning based on the idea that science, technology, engineering, and math are interrelated and should be taught in an integrated way. Traditional teaching in these subjects is often presented as a silo model, with each being taught in isolation, which prevents students from seeing the connections between the content learned in these areas.

My Two Cents

Throughout middle and high school, I struggled with math. It didn’t matter which course, every single one was a challenge for me. I hated Algebra II. I barely passed geometry, and forget trigonometry. I remember staring blankly at equations and formulas and wondering to myself, “When am I ever going to use this again?” Since my math courses were entirely textbook driven, I never really saw math’s connection to anything else. My teachers never gave any real-world examples. “Tonight, everyone will do the odd numbered problems” was a standard assignment.

Science was another story. While I wasn’t convinced that dissecting sheep hearts was entirely my thing, I loved chemistry, astronomy, and earth science. These subjects led me to question things, experiment, wonder about possibilities, and think like a scientist. I had teachers who presented science as connected content, making meaningful connections to real life. These classes were tough, but the nature of discovery learning kept my attention.

I wonder what would have happened if my teachers had connected their subject matter together. Would I (and other students) have been more successful in math? Would an integrated approach have made more sense? Would the connections between math and science have led us to see the connections in other areas and to the world? While we can’t live in a world of what-ifs, I believe that my high school grade point average would have inched a little higher had a STEM approach been implemented back in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Who Needs a Job?

Integrated STEM learning is becoming a requirement to create the kind of workforce needed in the United States and across the globe. Schools are responding by creating STEM courses, after-school clubs, and summer camps. Others are revamping departments and restructuring curriculum to meet these demands. Some schools are even reinventing themselves as STEM-focused schools and academies.

On the main page of Stem Education News (http://www.stemeducationnews.com) this statistic jumps out: “By 2018 there will be 1.2 million job openings in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Due to a significant projected shortage of qualified applicants, many of these will go unfilled. The job market is demanding students increase their knowledge in STEM fields. In order to prepare students for this future, STEM education is building rapidly and transforming as it progresses.”

STEM Education News

While some critics see STEM as a fad that will soon fade away, others believe this is a powerful vehicle to prepare our students for the global challenges in their future. As we know in education, though, things don’t remain the same for very long. Once the importance for STEM was established, the idea began to transform.

Adding the A

Not long after STEM took hold, educators began altering the original concept. Obsessed with acronyms in education, STEM has morphed into STEM-X, TEAMS, STEAM, STEAMIE, and STREAM. At a recent conference, a colleague mentioned that one school was now using the term HAMSTER: Humanities, Art, Math, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Reading. Jesse Schell, CEO of video game design company Schell Games, warns educators of this very thing. “If you just start adding everything in there, then you are left with nothing. Nothing important” (personal communication, January 27, 2015). So, we need to ensure that we are making meaningful connections between subject areas in a way that prepares students for the real-world experiences that they will face once they leave the school setting.

In The STEAM Journal, Henriksen writes, “Steam must become an essential paradigm for creative and artistically infused teaching and learning in the sciences” (2014, p. 1). I would argue that STEAM is a meaningful spin-off, especially in the elementary grades. The integration of arts into the STEM fields takes learning to a whole new level. The arts help to develop creativity, imagination, and collaboration (Sousa & Pilecki, 2013). Adding these components to STEM learning enhances the existing opportunities for critical thinking, problem solving, and communication. By allowing for creativity and critical thinking, teaching and learning move away from convergent thinking to divergent thinking. But beware—this is hard for teachers! Fostering divergent thinking means that there is no longer one correct answer to every pr...