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Want to help prepare your students for the future? It's true, we don't know all of the job paths that will be available to our current students. New jobs are needed as technology is advancing and our needs are changing in education. Without knowing what specific jobs we are teaching our students for (like we did in the past, industrial model of education), we need to teach our students the skills needed to be successful in ANY career.
These are their 21st century/6Cs skills - Our district identifies these as: Collaboration, Communication, Content, Critical Thinking, Creative Innovation and Confidence. At the base of these skills, the key points we are teaching are our State and National Standards as well as our building curriculums. How can we teach these ever-important skills to our students AND teach them how to read, write and do math? STEAM!
STEAM integrates Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics into an activity, encouraging student engagement and covering curriculum and standards all while naturally presenting and teaching those important 21st century or "timeless" skills our students need for their futures. There is much research out there (can be read about in the literature review) which shows the importance of the skills learned by using STEAM thinking activities in the classroom daily and how this can prepare student for their futures. We have learned, STEAM and a blended classroom environment go hand in hand to provide authentic learning experiences with student choice, ownership of work and voice (COVA approach). We have also learned from others how important it is to have a clear vision, strong leadership and clear communication to promote change within an organization.
STEAM integrates Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics into an activity, encouraging student engagement and covering curriculum and standards all while naturally presenting and teaching those important 21st century or "timeless" skills our students need for their futures. There is much research out there (can be read about in the literature review) which shows the importance of the skills learned by using STEAM thinking activities in the classroom daily and how this can prepare student for their futures. We have learned, STEAM and a blended classroom environment go hand in hand to provide authentic learning experiences with student choice, ownership of work and voice (COVA approach). We have also learned from others how important it is to have a clear vision, strong leadership and clear communication to promote change within an organization.
Here is a presentation showing our findings and how we plan to use what we have learned from Local & Global studies of STEAM education, to improve our innovation plan.
Andrea and I are kindergarten teachers in a low-income, largely Spanish speaking district. We want coworkers to join us in implement STEAM thinking activities in their classrooms daily, to equip students with skills needed for careers in the 21st century. Below you will see the benefits of STEAM in the classroom, what resources we are using such as our influencer model and 4DX strategy, to help us with our plan, the (updated) research behind this style of teaching/learning as well as our proposal to incorporate this into our district. We plan to post our progress & planning to reflect on our innovative change within our district as well as to help others to make a change in their own organizations. With this plan, we will help our staff to help our students to be prepared for their futures, have FUN learning and to be engaged with our lessons teaching our district/state/national kindergarten content.