STEM-Infusing the Elementary Classroom

Miranda Talley Reagan

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781506336978
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Science & Technology

Make learning relevant with STEM essential questions Planning interdisciplinary STEM lessons that meet K-5 grade level expectations can be a challenge. How do you fit it all in? In this engaging, well-organized guide, STEM instructional trailblazer Miranda Reagan provides a teacher-friendly, research-based guide to quickly and confidently infuse STEM concepts across content areas. Real-world vignettes, sample lessons and templates, discussion questions, and immediately applicable action steps help you seamlessly promote college and career ready skills. This inspiring guide helps teachers use STEM-infused interdisciplinary instruction to:

• Deepen all content areas, including English/ Language Arts
• Promote the 4Cs: communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity
• Require students to take risks to solve problems
• Differentiate instruction and scaffold support
• Expand students' specific measurable capabilities
• Incorporate design skills into the curricula

Save valuable time and confidently develop standards-aligned STEM projects across all content areas with this breakthrough guide! "Spirited Teachers Eliciting Memories. Miranda?s book is an inspiration for the elementary teacher who wants to begin using STEM in the classroom." She has answered all of the "but what ifs" and the "I?m not sures" and given teachers the answers to the "hows and whys" it will work."
– Dr. Jill C. Mertz, Adjunct Professor of Education at Maryville College, Maryville, TN "After reading this book, infusing STEM into your elementary classroom will be as easy as 1, 2, 3…A, B, C!"
– Susan Schipper, Elementary Teacher, Charles Street School, Palmyra, NJ

Chapter 1 STEM-Infusing All Content Areas

Miranda Talley Reagan

A Way of Teaching

In its most basic definition, STEM-infusion means using the concepts that are part of STEM (such as the engineering design process, creativity, collaboration, problem solving, and technology integration) to teach or practice all subjects in the elementary classroom. The teacher sets up a design challenge in which the students learn about and integrate ideas from various subjects in order to create a solution to the problem. For example, in a fourth-grade classroom, the teacher may plan to cover the following subjects during a week:

• English/Language Arts. Cause and effect
• Math. Triangles
• Social Studies. Branches of government, checks and balances
• Science. Environmental impacts

All of these topics can be tied together by presenting students with an engineering challenge that applies to current events. In this challenge, the students are answering the following essential question: Should the Keystone Pipeline be allowed? (See Resource A.) (At the time this book was written, President Obama had vetoed the bill. However, this topic is an excellent opportunity to understand our government and allow students to compile evidence to defend their ideas.)

The lesson begins with students doing background research to understand the branches of government, the process of a bill becoming a law, and the system of checks and balances. I, as the teacher, provide videos, articles, and discussion questions through Blackboard, our learning management system. However, if you do not have a similar system, Padlet is a free website that allows you to build a webpage of various digital resources very easily.

After the students have a basic understanding of our government, I present them with an article about the Keystone bill. The article is balanced in its political views and describes the supporter’s viewpoints on increasing jobs and financial benefits and the opposition’s stands on environmental impacts. It also includes a map of the proposed Keystone pipeline and the existing one. Since the two form a triangle, the students can use their geometry skills to determine the difference in distance oil would travel in the two pipelines. I then encourage the students to look at a historical perspective to create a list of pros and cons for the pipeline. Fortunately, the Scott Foresman fourth-grade reading basal includes a leveled reader on the Alaskan Pipeline. The students use this reader to develop a pros and cons graphic. So far, this sounds like a social studies lesson with some reading and science integrated, right? But this is where the design challenge comes in!

Now, the students have to “put themselves on a line.” The students have a pipeline labeled 1 to 10: 1 being completely for the pipeline and 10 being completely against it. They decide where they would rank their opinions at that point. Then I proceed to partner them up with someone who believes very differently on the issue. The design challenge is to build a pipeline that allows 200 ml of water to run a distance of 1 meter from one cup to another (see Figure 1.1). The students may use craft sticks, cardboard tubes, foam cups, straws, paper, tape, etc. to build their pipeline. This is an interesting challenge because the students first have to figure out that ALL of the water has to run downhill in order for the pipeline to work. It sounds obvious but so many students poke a hole in the side of the first cup instead of the bottom so some water is trapped from the get-go. Also, the students really struggle to keep their pipeline from leaking.

The really interesting and beneficial part of this challenge, however, is the conversation between the two students who have very different concerns for their pipeline. The “big oil” student is worried about profit loss if the pipeline leaks, while the “environmentalist” worries about the effects of an oil spill. The students get so involved in the project they treat it as if it were real. And suddenly all of these big ideas—cause and effect, government, geometry, environment—have a real world context.

Figure 1.1 Students designed and improved a pipeline as they learned about environmental issues and government in third-grade social studies.

SOURCE: Photo by Linda Talley.

SOURCE: Photo by Linda Talley.

Misconceptions About Stem-Infusion

EC⁴S³TREAM is an acronym that stands for Engineering, Creativity, Collaboration, Communication, Critical thinking, Science, Social Studies, Technology, Reading, English, Arts, and Mathematics…. Okay, I cannot even say that sentence out loud with a straight face. And that, right there, is the reason this book is titled STEM-Infusing the Elementary Classroom.

More times than I can count, when I have explained the concept of STEM-infusion to someone, I have heard responses such as the following:

• “Oh, you’re integrating arts into STEM….You should really call that STEAM.”
• “Since you’re using STEM to teach reading and arts, that should be labeled STREAM.”
• “Isn’t what you’re really describing more like project-based learning than STEM? I don’t think people in the hard sciences would consider that ‘pure STEM.’”
• “Oh, yeah…. That’s just thematic teaching. That was a fad back when I started teaching before high stakes testing came along. I think it’s funny that the pendulum is starting to swing back toward a thematic approach to teaching again.”

If you too had one of these thoughts when you first picked up this book, I understand the confusion completely. There are so many acronyms that have become spin-offs of STEM, it can be confusing to figure out exactly what we’re talking about here. To clarify, I will respond to each of the statements above.

• Creativity is embedded in the engineering design process. Therefore, I do not feel it is essential to include the word “art” in my acronym since I believe art is implied as part of “STEM.”
• STEM-infusion means STEM processes are used to teach or practice all content areas, including reading. Thus, reading falls under the umbrella of the word “infusion.”
• I am definitely not talking about “pure STEM” in this book. I am by no means a scientist, technologist, engineer, or mathematician. In fact, I was extremely intimidated by the idea of STEM when I first heard about it because of my lack of expertise in the complexity of each of those subjects. Now, I hold those subjects in high regard but instead of feeling intimidated by them, I have drawn out some of their most brain-stretching components and processes and combined them to teach elementary school.
• There are some elements of thematic instruction in STEM. In fact, one of the approaches that will be discussed in Chapter 6 is a thematic approach to STEM-integration. However, STEM-infusion takes thematic instruction beyond just connecting ideas by topic; it connects ideas by concepts that show up across content areas and challenges students to combine this conceptual understanding to design a solution to a problem.

This may all still seem a little unclear right now. If so, hold tight! As you begin to read further about how STEM-infusion plays out in the classroom, it will make more sense. In the meantime, enjoy reading about this EC⁴S³TREAM-ly interesting approach to instruction.

Said No One Ever

I have a confession to make. I am a Pinterestaholic. It started out completely innocent. I was legitimately using Pinterest to find lesson ideas, home decorating tips, and healthy recipes (that I will probably never actually cook). But somehow along the way I discovered the Humor category. And the rest is history. From that point on, my Pinteresting was no longer productive. Those little cartoons with the sarcastic yet truthful sayings make me laugh every time. And perhaps my favorite Pinterest jokes are the Said No One Ever ones. Look them up! If you have not figured it out already, I am an easy laugh. But for some reason at the end of an exhausting day, a good Said No One Ever joke is just what I need. And so as I was outlining this chapter, this thought popped into my head:

I really feel I can easily fit everything I need to accomplish into my school day and every student will receive the individualized help he or she needs.

—Said No One Ever

Spiraling Down

Over the past couple of years, I have received many emails from teachers who are looking to add STEM to their elementary classroom and are searching for lesson plans to get them started. I had the same struggle when I started teaching STEM. If you are brand new to the idea of STEM in elementary school, the energizer type activities found online—such as the classic bridge building challenge—provide a good jumping-off point. Using these, teachers can begin relinquishing their role as the center of the classroom and turn over the reins of leadership to the students. In turn, the students can practice communication and collaboration.

However, after spending some time with these pre-planned activities, you might notice the engineering challenges found online may offer only a loose correlation to your curriculum. For example, probably the most well-known engineering challenge is the egg drop challenge. In this activity, students are asked to design something to protect an egg so it can fall from a certain distance without being broken. The egg drop offers a fantastic opportunity for students to learn the engineering design process as they test and improve their prototype. They also practice the 21st century skills of communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity. However, if you are not reinforcing your curriculum with those skills, it is difficult to justify spending a large amount of time on the activity. Let’s be honest …Although we, as teachers, would love to provide our students with these rich opportunities to interact with each other and practice important collaborative skills, our students are tested on reading, math, science, and social studies (and many of us now have evaluations and even paychecks tied to those test scores).

So how do we fit it all in? How do we cover all of the standards for all of the subject areas, provide intervention for struggling students, offer challenges to stretch those who are above grade level, and make sure all of this happens in such a way that students will retain the information? And it is not enough that they just memorize and recite the material like we did so often in school, they must also be able to apply the information to higher-order thinking tasks. And although most of us appreciate the value of this additional rigor, we barely fit it all in back in the skill and drill days! To top it all off, we are preparing our students for a world we do not feel very comfortable in, a world where digital literacy is just as important as reading, writing, and arithmetic, a world where unlimited information is at your fingertips and application of knowledge is more valuable than retention. Feeling stressed yet? I know I am not the only teacher who has fallen victim to this overwhelming downward spiral of thought.

A Breath of Fresh Air

As you saw in the previous section, we teachers often times have the best of intentions in integrating innovative strategies but get bogged down when the rubber meets the road. For me, STEM-infusion has been a breath of fresh air in the world of educational change. Instead of adding one more thing that I had to fit into the day, with STEM, we have been able to do the following:

• •Give students an opportunity to apply information from all content areas, therefore providing a higher-order level of understanding of the curriculum standards.
• •Differentiate organically because each student uses his or her background knowledge and applies it in such a way as to find an innovative solution. In this way, every student is stretched.
• Create a culture where mistakes are seen as an important part of growth and learning.
• •Offer opportunities for students to practice collaboration, communication, creativity, and critical thinking in a w...