Teaching Elementary STEM Education

Unpacking Standards and Implementing Practice-Based Pedagogy

Sherri Cianca

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367150914
• eBook ISBN: 9780429619793
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This textbook offers practical guidelines for integrating science, technology, engineering, and mathematics into the elementary classroom in the context of addressing real-world problems, and cultivating in students high-level thinking and problem-solving skills. Designed to equip teachers and future teachers with tools to create and implement standards-based STEM curriculum and cognitively demanding tasks, author Sherri Cianca offers hands-on, easily implemented strategies that foster student reasoning, autonomy, and humanity.

This fresh approach to STEM teaching empowers teachers (preservice and inservice) and other leaders to better understand the standards and better design effective instructional practices. The chapters work together to advance teachers' abilities to achieve mastery-level understanding of content, translate standards into student-friendly curriculum, and create a robust learning environment. Each chapter contains "probes" to uncover incomplete and inaccurate conceptions and to focus attention on key learning elements. Chapter summaries and "Reflect and Apply" sections reinforce professional development, and appendices expand on chapter content and provide rich examples of STEM units, curriculum, and assessment criteria. Dr. Cianca's vision is that teachers serve as well-equipped change agents that will empower their students to transfer STEM learning into applications that will impart a positive impact on our future world.

1 Introduction

Education is not preparation for life; education is life.

—Paraphrase from John Dewey’s My Pedagogical Creed (1897)

The primary goal of education is to prepare students to become designers of their own learning that they would become designers of their own lives.

STEM-based teaching connects learning with life, with living (Eisner, 2003). STEM education prepares students for a future where invention and reinvention prevail, where teams labor together in a quest to solve problems, where growth in skill and understanding is continuous (Fulton & Britton, 2011). Skills and relationships bond in classrooms where students use their brains to build conceptual understanding one brick at a time; where students purposefully practice making informed, responsible decisions; and where teachers, caring and knowledgeable, support students and allow them to struggle along the path to success. Students are no longer inspired by the phrase “You will need to know this someday,” if indeed they ever were. In STEM classrooms, education makes sense—now—student power and involvement are enacted in the present. Teachers are brain changers put in position to prepare students to become architects of their own lives.

Elementary schools are pleading for assistance in implementing integrated STEM education programs (Daugherty et al., 2014). In an attempt to answer those pleas, this book is written for teachers and other educational leaders, formal and informal, who seek to move students from their present knowledge of STEM concepts into deeper understandings that align with local, state, provincial, and national standards. Those interested and involved in STEM education live in countries from England to China, Australia to Chili; in public, charter, or private schools; in summer STEM programs; in children’s museums; in after-school programs; and in youth-serving organizations. To start on this journey, it is useful to review some common terms associated with STEM education and to briefly express why particular elements are significant for STEM teaching and learning.

The Standards

The common core standards in the United States are not the only reputable standards in the world, or even in the US. Nonetheless, examples in this book are drawn from four US sources: Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) (NGSS Lead States, 2013), Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010), ISTE National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) (International Society for Technology in Education, 2000) and Standards for Technological Literacy (ITEEA) (International Technology Education Association, 2007). In no way does this choice suggest that these standards are superior. Though it is beyond the scope of this book to compare standards, a study by Schmidt and Houang (2012) found a high degree of similarity between CCSSM and the mathematics standards of the highest achieving nations. In like manner, in a comparative analysis of science standards across countries, the International Science Benchmarking Report (Achieve, 2010) concluded that NGSS standards were designed to correlate with international standards. This leads me to posit that the principles found in this book might readily be applied to all standards, be they national, provincial, state, or local.

You may have noted that the list of Common Core documents does not include a separate document for engineering standards. This is because the National Academy of Engineering in a publication on the topic, Standards for K-12 Engineering Education (NAE, 2010), argues that rather than a set of stand-alone standards, engineering content and principles are most useful and impactful when integrated into NGSS and CCSSM documents. Working together, science and engineering, and math and engineering, support student development of conceptual understanding as students make connections among and between related concepts.

Conceptual Understanding

Standards documents strongly emphasize growth in conceptual understanding. NGSS does so within the context of interconnecting and applying science and engineering to problem solving; CCSSM differentiates conceptual understanding from procedural knowledge; and ISTE and ITEEA call for critical thinking, problem solving, and decision-making.

Conceptual understanding goes deeper and broader than knowing a collection of facts. Conceptual understanding denotes analysis, evaluation, and grasping thoughts in a transferable way, making connections between and among ideas (Stern et al., 2018). Conceptual understanding strives to understand problems and develop solutions. Conceptual understanding is dynamic. It empowers students to (1) apply content flexibly, (2) question and compose interpretations, (3) build relationships between concepts, (4) design multiple representations, and (5) transfer learning to novel situations. Conceptual understanding enables students to construct and express evidence-supported argumentation.

When we compare conceptual thinking to surface knowledge, it may help to consider the difference between making a spaghetti dinner from scratch and opening a can of Campbell’s SpaghettiOs. Conceptual understanding of a topic is like having the fullness of understanding a chef employs when choosing, combining, and sautéing ingredients. The chef samples and tastes, stirs and adds in just the right proportions to craft a deeply satisfying culinary experience. In contrast, opening a can of SpaghettiOs, a cook does not need to know how to choose and prepare tomatoes, does not need to understand the sweetness and richness that result from frying garlic and spices in olive oil at just the right heat for just the right amount of time or how to boil pasta el denta. The cook simply follows the warming directions on the can. Like a fine chef, a teacher with conceptual understanding is able to transfer that understanding to novel (new) situations. That teacher meets the demands of each situation with knowledge and skill to inspire and support, creating an environment where students construct their own understanding.

If teaching is a profession—and I strongly contend that it is—teachers need to do more than follow “canned” units packaged by others. Teachers need to design their own lessons, lessons that meet the needs of learners they are responsible for teaching. Teachers need to teach for and with conceptual understanding. To do this, they must have deep mastery of the concepts students are expected to learn (DuFour & DuFour, 2015). When teaching a STEM topic, this means teachers will have mastery-level comprehension of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics concepts that are integral to understanding that topic.

Developing conceptual understanding involves practice in deep thought, in not knowing but persisting to find out. It involves controlling frustration when a solution is not immediately evident (Whitman & Kelleher, 2016). It requires interacting with the world in ways that are intellectually challenging. Building conceptual understanding involves failures and courageously learning from those failures (Johnson et al., 2016). It requires persistence. Conceptual understanding is led by a pursuit to make sense through constructing and testing and rebuilding. Though such depth of learning may at first appear beyond the elementary level, Moomaw (2013) argues that the quest for conceptual understanding is the force that drives young children. Children search for meaning by constantly questioning and by actively interacting with the world around them. Enter that world. Ask insightful questions. Involve children in discussions that will expand their thinking. Make your classroom a place of adventure, of discovery; a place where even the youngest student’s curiosity is channeled into conceptual thinking. For an example of how to do this, let’s consider the sensory table, a feature found in most pre-school settings.

Most pre-school classrooms incorporate water in a sensory table. Children are delighted when they pour water on a water wheel and the wheel spins. Without adult support, most children fail to recognize the relationship between the amounts of water they pour and how fast the wheel spins. When an adult asks, “What can you do to make the wheel spin faster?” student attention is drawn to factors that affect the force of moving water. Such questions stimulate thought and direct scientific inquiry. As children experiment, their natural curiosity is rewarded with conceptual understanding.

Concepts and topics are different. What is that difference? Concepts are abstract understandings formed in the brain from experience and reasoning (Stern et al., 2018). Based in real-world meaning, concepts connect specific sets of facts to form generalizations or mental impressions. Concepts are timeless, universal big ideas. In contrast, topics are subjects, points in an outline, or headings for a set of facts. Both concepts and topics have their foundation in details; the difference lies in how those details relate to one another. Topics consist of a list of details that are not necessarily related, whereas concepts are mental constructs that are formed and held together by the synthesis of related facts that interweave with one another to construct the whole.

When I think of concepts, I think of a five-year-old boy named Zack who came to visit when I lived in rural Ontario, Canada. In the car on the way to the farmers market and stockyard in St. Jacobs, Ontario, I asked Zack to tell me what he knew about cows. He held up his hand and showed me the two-inch space between his thumb and index finger. Zack said he liked to play with his set of farm animals, especially the brown cows. When we got to the stockyard, Zack’s experience of seeing, smelling, petting, and feeding cows of different breeds and sizes altered his internalized conception of “cowness.” Prior to the stockyard experience, Zack’s mental concepti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 STEM Education
• 3 Priority Standards
• 4 Unpack Content Standards
• 5 STEM Learning Practices
• 6 STEM Transdisciplinary Integration
• 7 Planning STEM Tasks
• 8 STEM as Pedagogy
• Index