STEM-ify Your Strategies

Claudia M. Geocaris

Common Core State Standards, Next Generation Science Standards, assessment literacy—how are teachers supposed to do it all? Instead of adding more to their plates, teachers can use trusted, proven strategies to integrate STEM into their lessons. By focusing on three critical STEM skills—thinking and planning like an expert, connecting conceptual information and its application, and using evidence to support thinking and conclusions—I will show teachers how implementing several classroom-ready tools and techniques can help them easily and effectively STEM-ify their instructional strategies.

Backwards Learning: Thinking Like an Expert

STEM education requires careful planning and design to account for the challenges that may arise when carrying out a project or experiment. That's why I always recommend to science teachers a technique called backwards learning (Boutz, Silver, Jackson, & Perini, 2012). Drawing on principles set forth in Wiggins and McTighe's Understanding by Design^® framework, backwards learning teaches students a step-by-step process for analyzing a question or problem and breaking it down into "knowing" and "doing" goals. Before beginning an activity, students should ask themselves three questions:

1. What is my task? Can I clearly define the task in a way that I understand deeply?
2. What do I need to know and understand to complete this task?
3. What do I need to be able to do to complete this task?

For example, during a unit on sound, an elementary school teacher challenged her students to find a way to communicate with classmates across a distance. Before beginning the unit, she worked with the class to analyze this task using a backwards learning organizer (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Backwards Learning in Elementary Science

When using backwards learning for an engineering and design assessment, as in this example, be sure the task is clear. Then, have students use the technique to guide their learning process and help them see what their design solution needs to address before actually beginning to work on their model. Over time, give full control of the process to students so that they learn to think backwards as a matter of course when designing solutions to problems.

Association Triangles: Connecting Concepts to the Design Process

Too often, students make an artificial separation between the content they are learning and its application. Learning about science and actually "doing" science in labs and design projects are seen as two entirely separate things. This separation creates a glaring problem because STEM disciplines are meant to be applied. To get students in the habit of asking the question, "How can I use what I have learned to help me develop a solution?", I recommend a tool called an association triangle (Boutz, Silver, Jackson, & Perini, 2012).

In a traditional association triangle, students write three critical vocabulary terms at the points of the triangle. Then, they write a sentence along each side of the triangle that explains how the two terms relate to one another. Finally, students summarize the relationships among all three terms at the center of the triangle. Many of the teachers I work with report that this tool has allowed their students to move beyond just defining vocabulary terms and helped them to understand and explain the deeper relationships between the concepts.

Teachers can use this simple but powerful technique to enrich conceptual understanding in STEM classrooms, too. For example, a middle school lesson might challenge students to demonstrate their understanding of Bernoulli's Principle by designing a kite that will meet key design criteria (i.e., launches easily, glides on the wind, and withstands the typical stresses on a kite). Before students begin working, they complete an association triangle connecting the terms lift, velocity, and kite design, as shown in Figure 2 below. Ultimately, connecting these concepts to their applications deepens students' understanding and improves their designs.

Reading for Meaning: Locating and Using Evidence

Common Core State Standards and Next Generation Science Standards emphasize evidence-gathering skills—that is, teaching students how to find evidence, evaluate it, and use it to support their conclusions. Reading for meaning, a strategy developed by Silver, Dewing, and Perini (2012), uses statements to train students to search texts for evidence that supports their positions. Statements can be true, false, or open to interpretation. In all cases, however, students must decide whether they agree or disagree with the statement and then record evidence that either supports or refutes it.

So, let's adapt this strategy to build STEM thinking, starting with data-analysis skills. For example, in a 3rd grade classroom, teachers might ask students to collect data on the weather for the first two weeks of school and compile a table like the one in Figure 3 below.

Figure 3: Data Table for Chicago Weather

Then, to build students' ability to analyze and draw conclusions from the data, teachers can present students with statements like these:

1. September is a rainy month.
2. During these two weeks, there were more hot days than cool days.
3. The average temperature for these two weeks is about 70 degrees.
4. September is a good month to visit Chicago.

For each statement, students have to decide whether they agree or disagree. Then, they have to cite specific evidence from the data table or perform mathematical calculations to support their positions. Groups of students can compare their conclusions and the evidence they used to support these conclusions. Finally, different groups can try to reach consensus on each statement. If the groups cannot reach consensus on a particular statement, the teacher should encourage them to revise the statement so that all students can agree (or disagree). To extend this lesson, teachers can challenge students to use what they learned to design a piece of clothing they would sell to tourists visiting Chicago at this time of year.

Teachers can also adapt the reading for meaning technique to help students design better experiments or products. For example, a 5th grade teacher adapted the technique for a car design challenge. She presented the statements shown in the organizer below (Figure 4) before students began working on their designs. For each statement, students had to decide whether they agreed or disagreed with each statement. Then, while building and testing their cars, they used their observations from the experience to collect evidence for and against each statement. Throughout the process, students used technology such as stopwatches and online videos about car design to build a larger pool of data from which to collect more evidence.

Figure 4: Reading for Meaning Organizer for Car Design Challenge

Teachers don't have to reinvent everything they are doing to successfully integrate STEM in their classrooms. Instead, by identifying the skills they are trying to help students develop and looking for sound instructional tools and techniques that build these skills, teachers can STEM-ify their teaching strategies without overwhelming themselves or their students.

References

Boutz, A. L., Silver, H. F., Jackson, J. W., & Perini, M. J. (2012). Tools for Thoughtful Assessment: Classroom-Ready Techniques for Improving Teaching and Learning. Ho-Ho-Kus, NJ: Thoughtful Education Press.

Silver, H. F., Dewing, R. T., & Perini, M. J. (2012). The Core Six: Essential Strategies for Achieving Excellence with the Common Core. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Claudia M. Geocaris has spent more than 30 years in public education as a science teacher, department chair, high school principal, assistant superintendent for instruction, and STEM consultant. She is coauthor of the forthcoming book from Thoughtful Education Press, Tools for Addressing the NGSS Practices: Teaching Students to Think Like Scientists and Engineers.

ASCD Express, Vol. 10, No. 8. Copyright 2014 by ASCD. All rights reserved. Visit www.ascd.org/ascdexpress.