Success with STEM

Ideas for the classroom, STEM clubs and beyond

Sue Howarth, Linda Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415822886
• eBook ISBN: 9781134739363
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Success with STEM is an essential resource, packed with advice and ideas to support and enthuse all those involved in the planning and delivery of STEM in the secondary school. It offers guidance on current issues and priority areas to help you make informed judgements about your own practice and argue for further support for your subject in school. It explains current initiatives to enhance STEM teaching and offers a wide range of practical activities to support exciting teaching and learning in and beyond the classroom.

Illustrated with examples of successful projects in real schools, this friendly, inspiring book explores:

• Innovative teaching ideas to make lessons buzz
• Activities for successful practical work
• Sourcing additional funding
• Finding and making the most of the best resources
• STEM outside the classroom
• Setting-up and enhancing your own STEM club
• Getting involved in STEM competitions, fairs and festivals
• Promoting STEM careers and tackling stereotypes
• Health, safety and legal issues
• Examples of international projects
• An wide-ranging list of project and activity titles

Enriched by the authors' extensive experience and work with schools, Success with STEM is a rich compendium for all those who want to develop outstanding lessons and infuse a life-long interest in STEM learning in their students. The advice and guidance will be invaluable for all teachers, subject leaders, trainee teachers and NQTs.

Chapter 1

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The impact of the STEM agenda in school

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By the end of this chapter, you will understand the:

•academic, economic, political and social arguments behind the STEM agenda for schools

•evidence for current ‘best-practice’ models for successful STEM education.

What is STEM?

STEM is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. It is used generically to identify circumstances or events that involve combinations of those subjects or individual subjects.

In educational contexts the term is often used as a convenient ‘label’ to refer to a subset of the curriculum or to define the character of extracurricular pursuits, for example ‘STEM subjects’ or ‘STEM enrichment activities’, as well as to describe staff roles, such as ‘STEM coordinator’.

Beyond schools, the ‘STEM agenda’ is a complex concept linked closely to the supply and demand of STEM professionals in industry, research and academia. There is political and economic concern about the recruitment and retention of skilled staff in the STEM sector, as these specialists are responsible for a large proportion of the ‘high-value’ products required to sustain a strong, competitive economy. Factors originating in society and the employment market-place, schools, further and higher education, and in industry itself continue to be examined to try to ascertain their impact on the supply of recruits with STEM experience and qualifications.

The ‘STEM agenda’, therefore, embraces the range of reports and subsequent targets and action plans drawn up and being implemented to meet the projected needs of industry and associated academia over the next decades.

STEM in schools

The National Curriculum varies across England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, but all students are required to study Mathematics and Science from entering school at around 5 years of age up to the age of 16, with some degree of choice in the nature of the course followed during the later years.

Other STEM subjects have a more variable curriculum presence.

•Design and Technology (D&T) is present in the curriculum for all students in the middle years of their education in the UK. D&T courses include:

○food

○textiles

○resistant materials.

Additionally, D&T courses provide access to computer-aided design and manufacture (CAD/CAM) and electronics and robotics. As D&T is not defined as a core curriculum subject in the way that Maths and Science are, there is variation in the options available and in the uptake of the subject.

•Engineering is not a requirement in the curriculum of UK schools and does not appear on many school timetables. This frequently results in students having little or no opportunity to appreciate the many facets of Engineering or the ways in which Science and Maths form some of the essential foundations for Engineering and its applications.

The practical skills, theories, rote learning and formulae practised in STEM classrooms, workshops and laboratories are most motivating for students when linked to real-life examples (Osborne and Collins 2000; Cleaves 2005; Barmby et al. 2008). There is also growing evidence (Ofsted 2011a) that the opportunity to work through an enquiry-based learning approach develops deeper understanding and increases the likelihood of continued study. The onus is, therefore, on teachers to interpret and illustrate topics using examples of development and application, linked to insights into how they are exploited by scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians in contemporary and futuristic contexts.

After Her Majesty’s Inspectors (Ofsted) visited primary (5–11 years) schools in England between 2007 and 2010 to survey D&T, they strongly endorsed learning outside the classroom activities and opportunities for pupils to take part in STEM-related extracurricular activities:

Enrichment activities were strongly represented in good curriculum provision. Visits and participation in local, regional and national competitions and initiatives provided stimulating contexts for D&T work. They contributed to pupils’ enjoyment and achievement of D&T.

After-school clubs were a feature in many effective schools, offering pupils the opportunity to further develop their interests and practical skills in cookery, engineering, construction or textiles.

(Ofsted 2011a)

After visits to secondary schools (11–19 years), similar messages were reported. Conclusions were that students produced outstanding achievements when they:

•demonstrated commitment to acquiring, analysing and applying knowledge

•were productive, demonstrated good management and efficient use of time, including use of computers to aid design and manufacture

•worked constructively with others and managed risks well to manufacture products safely

•responded to ambitious challenges, showing significant originality or creativity, and produced varied and innovative ideas and manufactured prototypes

•had opportunities to acquire a secure understanding of the properties of materials and use them with increasing confidence to undertake innovative or unusual design and making.

(Ofsted 2011b)

This report made considerable impact beyond schools, with The Engineer (2011) publishing the following comments:

The world faces a huge shortage of engineers with hands-on experience designing, making and using modern tools such as CAD/CAM, electronics and control systems … Exciting and imaginative D&T teaching in school will be crucial for our future success.

(The author was a talent resourcing manager for a multinational industrial group)

And

Now is the time to stop our children being channelled by a constraining curriculum into making weather vanes and CD racks, and to begin taking on projects that stimulate creativity, focusing on those borne out of product need, problem solving and sustainability.

(Royal Academy of Engineering 2011)

Further observations of the value of real-world examples are included in the reports of other initiatives, for example, the 2011 evaluation report for the STEMNET programme (Straw et al. 2011). This report emphasised the importance of STEM clubs and interactions with STEM ambassadors in increasing students’ interest in STEM and developing their subject knowledge and practical and transferable skills, such as team-working and problem-solving – all of which are important in future employability.

The widescale adoption of such curriculum enrichment and enhancement activities is at the core of the school-based targets in the current UK STEM Programme (discussed later in this chapter).

Ideas and advice about developing a rich programme of STEM activities, within and beyond the classroom, are explored in further detail in following chapters.

STEM literacy

Mastery of the three Rs – reading, writing and arithmetic – has been recognised as an essential objective in education for over a century. Literacy and numeracy are the terms frequently used to describe these competencies.

Recognition of the dependence of successful industries on the STEM skills of the workforce and the need for individuals both to understand technological and medical advances (and their social and environmental impacts) and to be able to use STEM skills in their everyday lives, has led to the concept of an additional competence, referred to as ‘STEM literacy’.

Nobel laureate Sir Harry Kroto supports the call for universal scientific literacy:

As well as trained engineers and scientists, we desperately need a scientifically literate general population, capable of thinking rationally – and that includes lawyers, business-people, farmers, politicians, journalists and athletes. This is vital if we are to secure a sustainable world for our grandchildren.

(Kroto 2007)

The importance of STEM literacy across society is recognised in the USA by the National Council of Teachers of English (2013). With reference to ‘twenty-first-century literacies’, they note that literacy must change as society and technology change and suggest that successful participants in our twenty-first-century global society must:

•develop proficiency with the tools of technology

•build cross-cultural connections with others to solve problems collaboratively

•design and share information for global communities

•manage, analyse and synthesise multiple streams of information

•create, critique and evaluate multimedia

•attend to the ethical responsibilities required by complex environments.

Skill and expertise in STEM subjects are requirements for those engaged in STEM-based further education or training. Less recognised is the level of STEM ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The impact of the STEM agenda in school
• 2. Enhancement and enrichment in STEM: making lessons buzz
• 3. STEM outside the classroom and beyond the school gate
• 4. Starting and running a successful STEM club
• 5. Extending and enhancing STEM clubs: making clubs sustainable
• 6. Encouraging STEM careers
• 7. Health, safety and legal issues: what you can and can’t do
• 8. Obtaining and making the most of funding
• 9. Resources: where to find resources and how to make the most of them
• 10. Going further: ideas from beyond the UK
• 11. Ideas bank: projects and activities for all ages
• Glossary
• References
• Index